Pemudah, the high-powered steering committee to help the nation steer through the rough waters of public services delivery systems for the benefit of businesses and Foreign Direct Investment, has finally seen the light.

Leaving aside tunnel vision, it has set its sights on Kuala Lumpur City Hall. Up till now, its strategy was to ‘pick low hanging fruits’ first. It took them more than a year and the results have been good by all accounts. Now, it appears to have set its eyes on ‘fruits’ higher up the tree. This is where the real action is.

I am sorry to be critical as more than half of the Pemudah members are my friends. But they sit in their official capacity and do in fact hold the trust of the public and the government of the day. Nevertheless, our friendship remains, I presume.

The problem with pursuing a ‘low hanging fruits’ strategy is that one only notices trees that are almost ready for harvest and that too for fruits that are visible at eye level. Rotten trees which do not even have buds are not quite visible, if we are only looking for fruits for harvesting. Trees with sparse or high hanging fruits may not be quite as visible either.

Let me give a specific example. I had chronicled an actual experience of the how corruption takes place in City Hall based on an account related to me by a friend of a friend, who deals regularly with the authority.

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I focused on City Hall because it is what the Housing and Local Government Ministry calls the ‘145th local authority’.

Although it is the biggest and probably among the oldest council, it is also outside the ministry’s jurisdiction although bound by its laws. KL City Hall falls under the Federal Territories (FT) Ministry, and operates with an annual budget that is bigger than that of most states in the peninsula.

My friend and ex-boss Elyas Omar was probably the most colourful of all the KL mayors. He probably did the most to promote excellence at City Hall and it achieved much. And, although he was once ascribed ‘Civil Servant Extraordinaire’ by Malaysian Business , the Umno-types found occasion to frame a charge of exceeding his jurisdiction when he decided to give all his directors an official Volvo car.

Today, more than Volvo cars are being given and taken without impunity in many local authorities and state-owned companies.

Ugly racial politics

Therefore, Pemudah’s decision to focus on City Hall is excellent. My argument is that if the Chief Secretary and Pemudah can make City Hall a glowing example of administration, then all other 144 local authorities can get their act together.

That singular action stream can allow the nation to close down Pemudah. After all, a steering committee is not designed to be a permanent institution but a stop-gap measure.

The real challenge is posed by the Umno-types in City Hall. You see, somehow they have not realised that it was their demeanor which caused 10 out of 1 federal constituencies in Kuala Lumpur to vote for the opposition in the last general election.

In any other country, the new mayor would consequently have been an opposition-aligned candidate, if such appointments are the only way to reflect the demands of the people.

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But the Abdullah Ahmad Badawi government made its first mistake by not accepting defeat. Therefore it appointed an Umno politician as FT minister and another public servant as Mayor. Such lack of graciousness about accepting truth was Abdullah’s first failure as premier.

Leadership is always about being a positive influence without using authority and power of one’s jurisdiction. Pak Lah could have easily appointed a third party or neutral person as the KL mayor. I had written and spoken to relevant ex-mayors, saying that former Segambut MP Dr Tan Kee Kwong was an able and fully qualified person.

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Instead he is today the co-leader of a task force to clear literally hundreds and thousands of land-law abuse cases for the Pakatan Rakyat government. Our ugly racial politics blurs even the fact of good men and women.

Tan (left) is the son of famous opposition leader Tan Chee Khoon. He would have made an excellent mayor for many reasons, apart from the fact that he would have been a government-aligned person, even though he was no longer active in Gerakan.

More importantly, he was known as an efficient and effective grassroots politician, being able to listen to the grassroots and follow through on issues and complaints. Moreover, he was a former deputy minister of land and cooperative development.

Seven challenges ahead

All organisations need good and able leadership to steer them into newer directions in solving problems. The present Chief Secretary has clearly won confidence in his ability and competency, in providing leadership to revamp the public services.

Such new oarsmanship faces seven challenges which I wrote about some time ago. Because the paradigm of power and authority is no more, we must migrate to the paradigm of influence and responsibility.

The effectiveness of these challenges is found in the open and transparent processes one uses and not just in the content or intent of such changes.

All leaders, whether in churches, NGOs or large mainstream systems, face the same set of challenges in an inter-networked world. This is a compound word of three inter-related and inter-connected technologically based convergence of words and worlds.

The seven challenges, as Pemudah seeks to oversee City Hall, arise from the point of view of public services delivery:

1. To migrate to an influence-based and not power or authority-based paradigm

2. To demonstrate a servant-leadership style and not a boss-leader paradigm

3. To engage within a tripartite framework of win-win-win and not a win-lose one

4. To establish a new direction setting framework and not a micro-management approach

5. To provide a ‘customer first’ not rules-based service delivery regardless of applicant for the service

6. To establish an open and transparent service and process methodology

7. To develop a foundation of an ICT-based, information intensive and knowledge-driven framework for the delivery of services

It does not take brilliance to figure out that KL City Hall is the front-end of real-time issues in multi-cultural, multi-religious Malaysia. The May 13th riots started in the city, not far from where Yap Ah Loy founded KL.

As we seek to become a more Malaysian nation, KL City Hall is as good a place as any to start to show that the government can deliver better services.

If we fail in KL, ordinary people will make a real choice towards change in the next election. As US presidential candidate Barack Obama puts it: “Let us learn therefore to read the writing on the wall.”