Trend of greater official secrecy under Pak Lah government

The third front where I had hoped would be special mention of new policy initiatives in the Royal Address is in connection with Abdullah’s pledge to lead an open, accountable and transparent administration — in particular a firm government commitment to introduce a Freedom of Information Act to replace the Official Secrets Act (OSA) and the removal of the OSA and declassification of all privatization contracts, whether toll contracts, power and water concessions, to put them in the public domain for the scrutiny of the Malaysian public.

The Works Minister, Datuk Seri S. Samy Vellu was recently very incensed and hurt. He appeared on the front page of New Sunday Times (Feb. 25, 2007) with blaring headlines: “‘Works Minister, still smarting over being accused of ‘going for blood’, says… ‘I’m no Dracula'”.

Samy Vellu accused me of calling him a Dracula.

He said: “Lim Kit Siang said I was going for blood. He was indirectly saying I’m a Dracula. Only a Dracula goes for blood. A man and politician of his age and experience should be more cultured when he talks about other people.”

I said he was “bloodthirsty” and I stand by what I said. But I never said he is Dracula. If he is a Dracula, then it is his own self-description!

Let me state in this House that “Dracula” had never entered my mind when in my statement of 3rd February I had demanded to know why Samy Vellu was “suddenly so ‘bloodthirsty’ as to want four Opposition leaders, namely Tan Sri Khalid Ibrahim and Tian Chua of PKR, Ronnie Liu of DAP and Dr. Hatta Ramli (PAS) jailed for at least a year under the Official Secrets Act (OSA) for revealing that the government had guaranteed profits to Litrak in the Lebuhraya Damansara-Puchong (LDP) concession agreement?”

This is what I said in that statement:

“What have the four done that they must be treated like ‘highway robbers’ and must be made to suffer the most severe form of punitive punishment, of being jailed for at least one year, if they are charged under the OSA and found guilty of unauthorized communication of an official secret?

“Have they done anything akin to sabotage or imperil the national economy, subvert the national security or undermine national stability?

“I do not believe that Samy Vellu, even in his most creative best, would be able to make out a prima facie case that the four Opposition leaders had done any of these terrible things in connection with he publication of the Litrak LDP concession agreement.

“I went back to the news reports as to what was revealed about the Litrak LDP concession — that the LDP concession:

• was “lopsided and not done in the best interest of the people”.
• allows the concessionaire to continue collecting toll irrespective of whether the company is reaping profits or making losses.
• that the government has very little power under the agreement as the concessionaire can continue to collect toll regardless of how much collection it has made.

“Are these revelations so earth-shattering as to shake the government, society and nation to their very roots as to require invocation of a draconian and repressive law to jail the four for a minimum term of one year each?

“In fact, astute Malaysians would have guessed the lopsided contents in the concession agreements and privatization contracts, even without sighting them.

“The question is what has made Samy Vellu so ‘bloodthirsty’ that he is behaving as if he has usurped the powers of the Attorney-General or had arrogated to himself the powers of a Super Attorney-General on toll concessions and OSA prosecutions? Why is he demanding his pound of flesh, muttering that ‘they will have to pay the price’?

“Samy Vellu should know that anyone charged and convicted under the OSA would be mandatorily jailed for a minimum of one year, regardless of whether the offence is grave or trivial, or the motive — whether it is to betray the country by selling national defence secrets or in the exercise of the highest form of patriotism to uphold accountability, transparency and integrity and to expose corruption and abuses of power.

“This was because Samy Vellu is one of the few remaining Cabinet Ministers responsible for the most shameful, undemocratic, repressive, draconian and pernicious pieces of legislation in the land – the 1986 amendment to the Official Secrets Act imposing a mandatory minimum one-year jail sentence on conviction, regardless of the gravity of the offence or the noble motivation for the disclosure. ”

Samy Vellu had lost out the public argument for his “bloodthirstiness” in wanting the four Opposition “whistleblowers” jailed for at least one year under the OSA while being blissfully unconcerned of similar breaches of the OSA by the concession companies, equity analysts and rating agencies which had freely made use of “official secrets” in the highway concessions to publicly flog their shares, loans and bonds.

I welcome Samy Vellu’s recent changeof-heart to fly the standard of a reformer and advocate for government openness, accountability and transparency over his efforts in the Cabinet to declassify the highway concessions.

Let me tell Samy Vellu that he cannot make the transformation from his self-description of “Dracula” to a saint unless he publicly apologises for his earlier “bloodthirstiness” in demanding that the four Opposition leaders be jailed for at least one year for “blowing the whistle” about the lopsided Litrak LDP concession.

This act of remorse and contrition must be followed up by his public advocacy, starting in the Cabinet, that all OSA investigations and proceedings, including against the four Opposition leaders over the toll concessions, should be halted until the OSA is phased out and replaced by a Freedom of Information Act.

But instead of abolishing the cult and infrastructure of secrecy, inimical to the principles of openness, accountability, transparency and good governance espoused by Abdullah, there is the reverse process of greater secrecy which must be deplored and halted — as evidenced by the New Straits Times report of March 11, 2007 in the expansion of the ambit of the OSA to cover several documents related to claims by contractors for extra funds for government projects, such as:

• The assessment report by the officer in charge of overseeing a government project;
• Comments by the government Claims Committee;
• Minutes of the Claims Committee’s meeting;
• The document stating the decision of the Claims Committee; and,
• The document which proposes the ex-gratia payment to be paid.

  However, my hopes that in at least three areas of anti-corruption, police reform and freedom of information there would be new government initiatives in the Royal Address have been proved wrong as there was not a single new government initiative for the new year.

[Speech (10) on Royal Address debate in Parliament 21.3.07]