THERE is one evil that Malaysia must get rid of before it can talk about going to a good place. And that evil is corruption. Even by the standards of anecdotal evidence, corruption is rife.
On Thursday — two days before this Leader was written — a motor vehicle examiner with the Road Transport Department was charged in the Sessions Court in Alor Star, Kedah, with 40 counts of failing to report corruption offences totalling RM42,100 between 2016 and 2019.
The bribes were given to the accused as an inducement not to take action against a transport company's lorries, which might have been in breach of regulations under the Road Transport Act 1987.
Little wonder that Malaysian vehicles, especially lorries and buses, have such abysmal safety records.
Drivers with no valid licence somehow manage to get employed by bus companies, only to be found out after some passengers lose their lives or limbs in nasty accidents.
Sadly, the offenders manage to live past such business-ruining episodes, only to commit the offences all over again.
Blame it on the slap-on-the-wrist punishments the country is famous for.
Public officers are so easily bought that even foreigners come to Malaysia to commit offences they wouldn't commit at home.
Foreign tourists and construction workers overstay because it is easy to do so. In a raid on an illegal settlement in Seremban on Wednesday, 11 were detained, some of whom were there for eight years!
Consider the "Ali Baba" trade, a sort of bribery exchange where City Hall officers running low on integrity get paid by foreigners who "rent" licences issued in the names of locals as inducement not to take action against them.
No, this isn't another anecdotal evidence. It is a result of six months of intelligence gathering by the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission's (MACC). And the scourge isn't restricted to Kuala Lumpur.
Local enforcement officers are allegedly protecting illegal businesses in big cities nationwide. If this isn't bad enough, what the MACC calls "hidden hands" are tipping off foreigners on impending enforcement operations.
The morality tank of the public service mustn't be allowed to run this low. Malaysia needs to shape up if it wants to achieve its ambition of being among the top 25 least corrupt nations in the world by 2033.
Just across the causeway is Singapore, the world's fifth least corrupt country in the world as ranked by Transparency International's annual Corruption Perception Index (CPI).
Let's not be ashamed to ask: how does Singapore do it? Don't go talking about square kilometres and population size. These don't count. CPI is a measure of perceived levels of public sector corruption.
What counts is the perceived level of corruption in our one million-odd-strong public service. Incorruptibility must become part of its DNA. The first step is to rid the service of the corrupt and corruptible.
The second is to hold the heads of departments accountable. Accountability doesn't mean letting off officers displaying such bad behaviour with warnings or transfers.
Accountability means imposing punishments that deter others from being involved in any form of corruption.
Finally, the Public Service Department, the central recruitment agency, must put in place a robust system to keep the corrupt from entering the service.