PUTRAJAYA, Sept 3 — Former international trade and industry minister Tan Sri Rafidah Aziz has proposed a ‘national corruption circuit breaker’.
She warned that if this was not implemented as soon as possible, the state of corruption in the country would deteriorate further.
“You see, we are talking about national degradation implicating the rakyat’s confidence and all that.
“So you need something to stop it. But you cannot stop it just like that (by taking a pill, and then everything will go away).
“A circuit breaker is a composite of so many factors, including understanding (corruption), the educative process and the firewall (preventive measures).
“If all these are in place, it (corruption) will be slowed down in a shorter time. God-willing, eventually, it will become an aberration — meaning once in a blue moon it will happen, this cannot be helped, because every country, there will be at some level, but it’s not a culture,” she said when met by reporters after speaking at 2nd Malaysia Anti-Corruption Forum titled “Restoring Trust and Building a Culture of Integrity”.
She added that Malaysians’ greatest fear is corruption becoming a culture.
“Our greatest fear is when it (corruption) becomes a culture where everybody sees everybody doing it and they validate it,” she added.
Earlier, during her session at the anti-corruption forum, Rafidah listed several elements that would make a national corruption ‘circuit breaker’ effective.
These are: the need to weed out and penalise the corrupt where no more offenders are mollycoddled in the future; institute educative processes in all spheres (workplace, home and government agencies); and forge an anti-corruption culture and society that instil in Malaysians the realisation that ‘stealing’ is wrong.
