THINK bungling, blundering or bumbling, one thinks of Malaysian government companies.
Can't blame such scathing assessments.
It happens so often that billion-dollar losses by these clunky companies are no longer breaking news.
Today, it is the turn of Felcra Bhd, which owes the government RM3.67 billion, almost half of which is owed by Felcra Properties and the Semarak20 mixed development project.
If our reading of the national narrative on the Felcra fiasco is right, the focus seems to be on Felcra Bhd's ability to pay its debt.
The narrative can't be more wrong. Felcra's bungling, blundering or bumbling has its origins in several factors.
First is the lack of political will to act early.
For reasons best known to governments that come and go after every general election, acting early seems so hard to do.
As the Felcra failure shows, procrastination is a thief of government money.
Lots of it, which eventually will fall on taxpayers as service tax, value added tax, income tax or any other taxes the 21st-century taxman can think of.
As the Public Accounts Committee had revealed recently, the Semarak20 financial flop surfaced as early as 2019 when Felcra made an "s.o.s" call for RM544 million from the government to continue the project.
Why didn't the ministries responsible for funding and overseeing Felcra act then rather than wait until the debt spiralled to RM3.67 billion? Some blame must lie there because speedy action could have stopped the rot from growing.
Those who had the power didn't solve it.
They just let it grow cancerous. But what is worse, those who have the power now don't seem to want to do it either.
Second is the people factor. Financial flops suggest that some of the people chosen to run Felcra companies and their boards are not doing the job for which they are remunerated handsomely.
It is now becoming clear that a few of Felcra's businesses are not within its competence.
The board could have stopped them, but it clearly didn't. A key role of the directors is to ask the right questions.
Most don't because they don't know enough about the business to stop the company from heading
in the wrong direction.
If their role is to monitor the company's management — which clearly it is — then why did they allow the company to venture into a business that it knew not much about and fail so disastrously?
This is incompetence writ large. Incompetence is reason enough to deserve a sack, but why put such incompetent people there in the first place? We have a history of politics dirtying government companies.
This must end. We detect a disturbing trend, our third factor. The government's talent pool seems to come from the same pond, suggesting that Malaysian competence is only duck-pond deep.
With a few exceptions, top managers and board members appear to be a musical chair between retired government servants. Time to look beyond the duck pond.
Finally, lack of accountability. People come and go poking billion-ringgit holes in government companies, but only a few are made to pay for their sins.
The rest drive the streets of Kuala Lumpur and beyond in their Maserati with Jimmy Choo's shoes to match. The choice is here: accountability or financial fiasco.