Cash for honours – A Malaysian Dilemma
WE ARE ALL familiar with a certain joke, much in vogue, about a dead certainty of a pebble thrown randomly high above a Malaysian gathering landing squarely on a Datuk.
Political jokes or cartoons, whether hilarious or not, apparently carry a message of sorts, and this particular one is stingingly pointed in its contemptuous condemnation of a widespread practice that has become a national embarrassment. State, federal governments and royal palaces, some more brazen, and others less so, have been responsible for debasing our honours system instituted, and rightly so, to honour citizens for bravery, for distinguished service to science, soccer, cricket, industry, community and whatever else considered worthy of public recognition.
Cash for honours in modern times was David Lloyd George’s answer to the eternal difficulty of raising money for party funds. Lloyd George, as some will recall, was the Liberal Party Prime Minister of Britain who in 1916 replaced Herbert Asquith. History tells us that while this practice was nothing new, it was the sheer scale of Lloyd George’s marketing of honours operations that alarmed the nation.
Read more…