LCS: How does greed prevail over national interest?

All this has happened before. Will all this happen again?

Will there be another scandal like the LCS (littoral combat ship) in the future?

Massive corruption scandals in Malaysia are a little bit like school shootings in America. You would think that one would be so traumatic that it would lead to a super clamp down and a commitment to ‘never again’.

Of course, this isn’t the case.

There is precedent to suggest that these things will happen again, because they have happened before.

The most natural example is probably the Scorpene scandal. We’re also still dealing with the fallout from the 1MDB scandal.

All this has happened before.

They say that McDonalds is actually a real estate company, and that airlines are actually banks.

These provocative claims are based on what the true ‘core business’ of these companies are.

The things they are known primarily for - be it fast food or flying - may not actually be the company’s biggest source of income.

If McDonalds makes more money over the long term from its real estate dealings than it does from selling food, then maybe it’s wisest to think of it as a real estate company, even though it always positions itself as a food company.

So, in a similar vein, perhaps it is wise to ask: what is government? The conventional answer is probably something like: the people and institutions responsible for making sure everything around us works properly.

Is that their true core business though? The best answer to this question is nuanced of course.

There are around 1.6 million Malaysians working in the civil service, and for a vast majority of them, their core business as part of the ‘government’ is simply to do their jobs, serving the country, and making sure things run properly.

At the very top levels of government institutions however, stand the Rich Men.

I posit that the core business of the Rich Men is not to serve the country; it is instead the same as the core business of Rich Men everywhere, which is to get richer.

We might go so far as to say that for this most important layer of the government, the core business and biggest center of gravity is corruption.

To my mind, this is the only way to explain the recent LCS naval scandal.

The most salient feature of the LCS scandal is how boringly unremarkable, and unoriginal the scandal is.

It follows what is by far the most tested, tried, and true model of government corruption there has ever been.

Somebody says the country needs A, and then the Rich Men figure out how to slowly inflate the cost of A tens or hundreds of times more than its actual costs, pays for it using taxpayer money, and takes a cut.

If we’re ‘lucky’, we at least get a decent final product. If we’re not, we get submarines that can’t dive, and ships that don’t exist.

It’s the exact same simple formula used for any number of infrastructure projects, white elephant developments, and so on.

The defence industry is particularly susceptible to this problem, because it’s easier to hide more and more sketchy details under the guise of ‘national security’.

The face melting irony of course is that while the crooks yell national security, they are in fact perpetrating a national robbery. They are talking about how best to defend the house, while they themselves are robbing it - and all the aircraft carriers in the world couldn’t protect us from this robbery.

Entire books could be written about the levels of greed involved, and all the ways in which every single institution, rule, or law is bent and broken from the sheer mass of gravity that greed produces.

The question that really matters is: how does greed ultimately prevail over the national interest? Secrecy is the first line of attack.

In the old days, one could go far just using secrecy. No longer. We live in an era of exposés, and eager bloodhound opposition politicians.

Nowadays, it can often take a while, but scandals involving billions usually come to light sooner or later.

Has that solved the problem though? Surely now that we can see this corruption, there should be no more of it? Over these last weeks, the LCS scandal has been laid bare. Just recently, a pretty key Rich Man was even charged.

So what? Are we going to get this money back? Was this one Rich Man really the only guilty one? Will we catch the rest of them? Will this deter future corruption?

Perhaps most importantly: How many Malaysians truly and deeply care? (Besides the ones for whom this is just more fodder to rant on about how bad things are).

Have we struck a lethal blow against corruption? Or will another scandal one day simply follow again, the way the LCS scandal followed the Scorpene scandal? In the fallout, each present and former ruling coalition, minister, or politician blamed each other, in a perfect recreation of the Spider-Man meme where identical Spider-Men are pointing accusingly at each other.

This was reflective of our fairly typical two dimensional thinking, where it’s either X’s fault, or Y’s fault. Surely by this point the fault is completely collective.

We have been conditioned to think that when a government does something bad, the only thing we can do is consider voting for their opponents.

We’re conditioned to think that that’s the only meaningful role we can play - the only pebble we can throw at this mountain of corruption. That and maybe ranting and raving a little bit on social media, so they take down at least one scapegoat or two.

This idea that that is all we can do - that is the true weapon of the enemy. The true instrument of their subjugation.

This is the actual answer to how greed prevails over national interest.

Yes, when some people get too greedy, and enough people jump up and down, once in a while a scandal will break, and a few heads will roll. This is essentially just chalked up as the price of doing business.

But what typically happens is that the entire culture and systemic institutional crookedness that allowed this corruption to take place, will remain intact and unbroken - just like it did between the Scorpene and LCS scandals. This will allow the greater community of Rich Men to eventually continue engaging in their core business, as usual.

Sometimes, it looks like we can vote these problems out. Frankly speaking, that seems unlikely to be the solution any more. The actors swap roles, but the script remains.

Instead, it feels like we will need to evolve these systems and cultures out.

The reason these problems remain, and repeat again and again, ad naseum, is because nobody has consciously successfully built an alternative to the existing culture.

I’m not saying it’s easy to do. Quite the opposite. But it’s better to start thinking about how to walk the correct path, no matter how difficult - than it is to keep walking around in circles, banging our heads against the same walls, scandal after scandal.

NATHANIEL TAN works with Projek #BangsaMalaysia. Twitter: @NatAsasi, Email: [email protected]. #BangsaMalaysia #NextGenDemocracy.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Sinar Daily.