CORRUPTION MAIN OBSTACLE TO DEVELOPMENT

KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 28 (Bernama) -- Corruption is the single most important
obstruction to a nation's development, former prime minister Dr Mahathir
Mohamad said Tuesday.

He said corruption was a social disease found all over the world and that no
country was absolutely free from the menace and that in some nations, corruption
had become institutionalised.

"And corruption is among the most difficult crimes to detect and even more
difficult to gain conviction in courts of law. But corruption is the single most
important obstruction to a country's development.

"Good decisions cannot be made and even bad decisions would face a lot of
delays. In the end most of the investments for the development of the country
just could not be made," he said his speech at the Global Competitive Forum at
the Four Seasons Hotel in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

The text of his speech, entitled "Sharing Malaysia's Experiance in Becoming
A Competitive World Player", was made available to Bernama here.

The former prime minister pointed out that contractors for government
projects were usually the principal victims of corruption and "just about
anything which involves approvals by the authorities would be subjected to
demands for illegal gratification."

"With corruption, cost must go up. How much it will go up cannot be
ascertained. There is no rate for corruption and there is no certainty that
after payments are made there will not be others who will demand for
gratification.

"There is corruption in Malaysia, though it was still at the first stage
during my time, that is, the corrupt officers still hid their acceptance because
they feared being apprehended or they did not like doing wrong openly," said Dr
Mahathir.

At this stage, he said it may still be possible to reduce corruption but
when it reached the second stage, becoming part of the people's culture, and
everyone, from the top to the bottom openly expect and accept bribes, little
could be done to stop corruption.

However, he said corruption could be reduced although it cannot be prevented
altogether.

"In Malaysia we insisted in shortening the process and the time for making
decisions. This we did by introducing manuals of procedures for every type of
work, by having work flow charts and desk files for every officer.

"If the time taken to approve or disapprove goes beyond that stipulated in
the procedures we would be able to quickly know that something was wrong and we
would know where the delay had taken place and the culprit involved," he added.

He said the result of this system was dramatic and suddenly the city of
Kuala Lumpur grew, investments were approved, factories were built and all the
infrastructure projects took off.

"Admittedly there was still some corruption but not to the extent that the
development of the country could not take place or be grossly delayed," said Dr
Mahathir.

-- BERNAMA