COMMENT | Corruption is general all over Malaysia

COMMENT | In the ending passage of his short story “The Dead”, James Joyce writes with delicious detail that the newspapers were right: “The snow was general all over Ireland, falling everywhere on the bogs, the hills, the Shannon, the church steeples, the graves of the dead and on the living.”

Here in Malaysia, we have been spared the cold and the snow but not the ill wind of corruption blowing into every nook and cranny of the land, their ugly and misshapen swirls all carrying the same sinister message that gratification is good; that greed is great.

Day after day, it blows through our border posts and checkpoints; our airports and our seaports; our timber-rich hills and our fish-filled seas; and our GLCs, our hospitals, our schools, our agencies, our departments and our ministries. Through every one of them...