西崎崇子 - 3650 夜

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

How Monopoly is ruining Malaysia…

Imagine having no alternatives for the bad service you receive at any state-own post office, government departments (Immigration dept., Civic Center, TNB, etc.), or even—right now, in our case—from the very government that halted the whole nation’s economy since half a century back? In our case, Barisan National, that is.


Had the police force in this country be run by 2 separate entities—or bodies—we wouldn’t have lost so much confidence in the uniformed enforcers every time we got pulled over. A mere “20 Ringgit Boleh Lah!” could easily erase an offender’s name off the list/record he was supposed to be in…


Had the Immigration Department had another aptly-named Doppelgänger ‘Department of Customs & Immigration’ (or something better…), we wouldn’t have to wait in line for another 3 hours due to ‘some technical problem’…


Had the management in the national courier be a tad more efficient, I wouldn’t have had paid the insurance for something that couldn’t be insured. 3 returned parcels a week later (because it couldn’t be covered) and a simple ‘We didn’t get the memo’ (the staff didn’t know parcels can no longer be insured, claimed that they didn’t ‘receive the memo’ from head office based in KLIA) had ruined my reputation. For RM1.50 (US$ 0.45) a parcel, I now have a tainted relationship with 3 very important customers because I didn’t meet my deadlines. For RM 4.50… WOW…


When I approached the manager for possible ‘damage recovery’ (compensation…), he shrugged off any claims that he and his branch was responsible. I further pressed for his superior’s contact details—who is based in KLIA—and he didn’t look too happy. After minutes of hesitation he finally got someone to ‘call me’… the whole fiasco had taken up a full working day of mine :-( The result, the KLIA-based guy was willing to ‘look into it’…


Imagine we have only one shampoo brand to use, or one single oil company that sells what is now the world’s most precious organic compound. A company can always jack up the price of a product when it has the only presence in a market & that people can’t live without it. Do you really think diamonds are synonymous with wealth, riches and social status? DeBeers used to controlled 90% of the world’s diamond production, and f’ course, used that to fill its own insatiable appetite—they marked up the price to a thousand times higher and made the diamonds ‘stones the riches breathe and live’.


Now imagine a world that is run by one single entity. A country, more like. After decades of economy stumble we still carry the false hope that the faces we used to know could change the world & the place we live in. Neighboring countries have already risen from the ashes, and stupid local politicians still dared to compare us to ‘Myanmar’ (“we’re much better than Myanmar…”)—an ill-fated country since decades back—and got booed on stage (“Why compare us to Myanmar? Why not Singapore?”) Ha, some poor souls might not realize it, but stupidity is—at times—inborn.


Are there no alternatives to the already-vast BN ruling? Will there be a future for our country, the ‘Fifth Dragon’ in the 60s and 70s? When have we started to slack off, trail behind Thailand and even Indonesia, only to find ourselves mirroring—and proudly yelling that we’re much better than—Myanmar. What a sad truth. This is the result of, allowing monopoly to take over humanity.


Peace.

No comments: