THE STORY BEGINS
Kuala Lumpur City Hall had cut down a tree behind our house. The workers had cut the tree trunk into smaller chunks for easy removal. Instead of removing all the pieces, they left one small part of the tree trunk about one metre long to rot. As time passed, people were conveniently throwing their garbage there.
Our neighbour, a Mrs. Lim had asked me to help her contact the city hall to remove the tree trunk. It was then that I experienced the bureaucracy of government bureaucracy in the early nineties.
I phoned the nearby City Hall branch office to talk to the person in charge of garbage collection. The man on the phone asked me to hold on. Ten minutes had passed, and the man had not picked up the phone to answer to my complaint.
I decided to hang up the phone and tried to call again. This time, it was another number from the list of numbers. Another officer who picked up the call answered, “I am sorry, Tuan Haji has already left the office. Ah, the phone is left unattended on the table. It’s past office hours. Can you call again tomorrow?”
Disbelievingly, I called the first number several times. True enough, it was still engaged. Apparently, the City Hall officer had placed the phone on his table, and went straight home.
As my anger flared up, I wrote a letter to the City Hall to complain about the incident, and about the uncollected tree trunk. One week had passed, a second week went by, but the tree trunk was still not collected. There was no response to my letter of complaint. I went to the office and asked for an explanation, yet nothing was done to follow up on the complaint.
Back in those days, City Hall was notorious for its negligence in collecting rubbish, or attending to public complaints. No amount of letters would solve the issues. I was told that even going to the office to bang tables did not work for many people. The employees of City Hall had such thick skin that they would not bother to reply to any complaints. Phone calls would be transferred from one department to another before it finally ends up unanswered. In the end, most complainants would walk away, leaving these public servants to their morning breakfast, morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea and their snack time before getting ready to punch their card sharp 10 minutes before 4.30pm. Public servants were generally not motivated, similar to what I observe in less developed nations Africa and Asia.
Around this time, I had purchased a good Canon EOS 100 camera. With my camera, I decided to take a drive around the whole township of Kepong. To my great surprise, there were so many illegal dumps left uncollected. Old mattresses were left by the roadside by some outsiders, and construction debris and garbage was strewn all over the place. In one afternoon, I had snapped over 60 photographs. This was the place I had lived for many years. It was an eye-opener that survey I did around the housing estate. For the first time, I saw how dirty the place had become. It wasn’t the fault of residents, but people from elsewhere, who conveniently dumped the garbage in locations where illegal dumps had built up.
Letters, Letters, Letters
Long strings of letters followed. They were addressed to the City Hall mayor, and copied to the local Member of Parliament and the Ministry of Housing and Local Government.
After several rounds of follow-ups with letters, I was told that City Hall officials had made several rounds to check out the complaints. There were no responses from City Hall to any of my letters.
They came when I was at work. But, my mother who was at home told me a City Hall officer had asked her why I was complaining about the illegal dumps in the whole housing estate.
When I saw that there was no follow-up action by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall, I decided that the only thing I could resort to was to complain to The Malay Mail. After several rounds of complaints, Lee Boon Siew, its editor, told me: “Hey, since you are already writing for The New Straits Times, why don’t you also write for us?” I couldn’t resist but immediately gave him my word, “Yes, I would be more than happy to!” The rest is history.
A new beginning in Journalism
My first articles appeared in The Malay Mail about rubbish dumps in Taman Kepong. Thanks to Boon Siew, I could make use of the pictures of the illegal dumps and make some money with it!
And, the best part was – after each article appeared in The Malay Mail, the City Hall immediately swung into action. The rotting tree trunk beside my neighbour’s shop was finally taken away.
For me, this was a triumph over the City Hall’s bureaucracy! While in the past, they had ignored letters and phone calls, now the staff at City Hall had to watch their backs. Their bosses were monitoring their performance from the news articles that appeared in the newspapers. Back then, The Malay Mail was a very strong community newspaper, well-respected by its readers. The Hotline was effective in handling complaints, because the journalists in charge of the desk made every attempt to ask tough questions to perpetrators of wrong.
Somehow, since Berjaya Vincent Tan’s mega suit of defamation in 1994, I noticed that Hotline has somewhat lost its sting. Understandably, the Hotline had been thrown several suits for defamation, that it had taken the softer approach. Its effectiveness is no longer there. In wanting to publish two sides of the stories, without asking tough questions, the Hotline has become a channel for the perpetrators of wrong to explain their course of actions, leaving the aggrieved party looking bad for lodging the complaint. Journalism has lost its flavour. I have always contended that whenever an aggrieved party complained, it was because the trader refused to entertain their requests. Unless tough questions are asked, most traders would tell the Hotline journalist to request the aggrieved party to contact them. While there were cases where complainants received better treatment from the management, others continued to suffer in silence, with no one to address their complaints.
Thankfully, these days, complainants are able to resort to the Consumers Tribunal with their petty claims - but the process is so tedious that eventually the complainant would choose to drop the case.
When I started writing for The Malay Mail, I was a sales manager with a chemical company. Being in the sales line also meant that I had to be on the ground most of the time. With me all the time was my EOS 100 Canon camera which I kept in an igloo box to protect it from the heat of the day. The camera was always loaded with film, which by now, was supplied freely by The Malay Mail.
While working hard to look for more orders, I was also looking for potholes and illegal dumps. Whenever I saw a big pothole, for example, at the traffic light near Jaya Supermarket in Section 14, I would stop by the road, pick up my camera and start clicking away – sometimes under the hot sun – just to capture a good shot showing how dangerous the pothole could be if a motorcyclist had hit the pothole. Sometimes, it also meant talking to some passersby to see how long the pothole had been there. There were some motorists who honked and gave me the thumbs up.
During the weekends, I would make my trip to the Malay Mail office to develop the photographs and submit my stories. Most stories were about potholes and illegal rubbish dumps that once, the editor, Azmi Ansar called me the “Garbage Reporter!” To me, it was fun because I was being paid for each article that appeared, but what was more important was the fact that the City Hall workers would start clearing the illegal dumps only whenever it appeared in the newspapers.
There were of course several cases where the illegal dumps had been removed, but petty hawkers were still dumping their garbage at the same spot. At Kampung Bukit Lanjan, there used to be a big heap of rubbish next to the old Jalan Damansara. I even found maggots in a pail that was dumped by the petty traders.
There was also another incident where I was trying to investigate the culprits behind several cable drums that were left abandoned on a playground near my mother’s house. A week before, I had seen some cable laying work by a contractor. They were the people who abandoned the drums after the work was done. Chinese New Year was approaching and I was determined to find the culprits to ensure that these empty cable drums were removed. However, numerous phone calls to Telekom Malaysia and Tenaga Nasional (TNB) for more than two weeks fell on deaf ears. Chinese New Year came and went by, yet nothing was done to remove the cable drums.
Finally, after losing my patience, I wrote an article about the white elephants abandoned by the utility company. Within less than two days, someone came to remove the empty cable drums. Until today, I do not know who was responsible for the empty cable drums – and why they finally decided that they were responsible for the drums after the contractor had abandoned them. It was obvious that the irresponsible contractor had decided that dumping the cable drums at the playground was the only way they could save some money.
A Chinese gentleman at Tenaga Nasional whom I had lambasted over the phone told me once: “Hi, you know, whenever you call, I always make sure I follow up on the complaints to see if my staff had attended to it.” He had noticed that I was quick in writing words of praise in Letters to the Editor the moment they had acted on someone’s complaint. It happened that I was interviewing an old lady. During the interview, she had mentioned that Tenaga Nasional staff were very helpful in solving her power outage despite of a heavy thunderstorm. I was touched, and I wrote: “A bouquet of flowers for TNB staff.”
It was only much later that I learnt what had given TNB staff the additional push whenever adverse publicity appeared in the newspapers. First, the then Chief Executive Officer, Tan Sri Ani Arope was extremely reactive towards adverse publicity. Secondly, his Public Relations manager, Syed Hidzam Syed Osman, whom I only referred to by the name, Syed, was always monitoring the newspapers.
Syed and I became good friends. Whenever a complaint was received, before I wrote a negative story about TNB, I would check with him to see whether the complaint could be immediately solved. There was one time a breakdown happening in a housing estate. I called Syed, and he immediately assured me: “Stephen, let me check. I will come back to you in about 10 minutes.”
Sure enough, within 10 minutes, the mobile phone rang. “Well, Syed,” I told him, “If you have solved the problem, why do I need to carry the story anymore? The complainant is also happy. I am not all out to create adverse publicity for TNB.”
There was a stark difference that I found in Telekom Malaysia and TNB. It has become an illustration of one’s efficiency and the other’s bureaucracy. After all these years of privatisation, I am glad that the old hats have been removed for whatever they were worth. The old public relations manager of Telekom had retired, and several years later, I noticed the difference. With the old guards, we were never able to contact the public relations manager. Even if we managed to get hold of her staff, we would be told to write an official complaint to which they would respond. It goes without saying that even though they made an attempt to respond, it was only several weeks later after an article appeared in The Malay Mail. The letter would say, “Thank you for highlighting the complaint. We assure you that this complaint has been referred to the relevant department.”
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