I cannot helped but to feel both vindicated and mildly amused with the strident response the National Security Council (NSC) issued to rebut criticisms against its poor management and preparation against the country’s current flood disaster. They even took the trouble to name me 4 times in the lengthy reply, accusing critics of “making their remarks from the bench” who “are full of pomp”.
I could respond to the NSC rant, paragraph by paragraph, which I won’t do. I would focus on the 2 key points arising from the article.
Firstly, the NSC speaks as if it could do no wrong and the public, including Members of Parliament like myself should shut up if we are not involved in the Government’s disaster management exercise. The NSC cannot be more wrong.
While the public are not directly involved in the operations of the NSC, if the NSC does a terrible job, it is certainly our duty to highlight these issues. We highlight the issues not for the sake of being embarrassing the NSC and the Government, but so that those in power can actually right those mistakes, buck up and mitigate the problems faced by the people.
The NSC accused me of making “wild allegations” by quoting unfounded rumours in the social media. It felt “especially sorry that a public figure like Tony Pua would stoop to quoting information from an unreliable source to lambast the Government, particularly towards the NSC.”
I reviewed my 2 prior press statements again and I did not find myself quoting any such rumours. Instead, I quoted the Minister of Trade and Industry, Dato’ Seri Mustapa Mohamed who also happens to be the UMNO Chief for Kelantan.
Astro Awani reported that Dato’ Seri Mustapa said although preparations on paper were smooth, the reality was different. “In coordinating a natural disaster of this magnitude, quick and precise instructions have to be issued by an experienced leader. We must have a commander who is capable of handling several departments simultaneously,” Mustapa told reporters in Kuala Krai.
I didn’t realise that Astro Awani is a social media channel which cannot be trusted, or that Dato’ Seri Mustapa is an “unreliable source”, according the the NSC.
Clearly in this case, no matter how “abnormal” the flood disaster had been, there is absolutely no excuse for the lack of a “commander who is capable of handling several departments simultaneously” and proved the disastrous lack of coordination between the relevant government agencies.
I completely agree that in managing disasters, there will often be challenges and such challenges are often unpredictable. However, NSC has failed to even demonstrate any urgency in its leadership as a “commander” and was terribly slow in responding to the rapidly escalating crisis.
Secondly, the complete lack of preparedness and urgency to deal with the crisis was exposed by NSC’s own statement. It appears that NSC was only interested in taking a leaf of the Prime Minister to imply a threat of “libel” against me.
Tony Pua can be held for libel by claiming in the article that the Deputy Prime Minister, Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin is only now meeting the NSC on 27 December 2014 to deal with the flood situation; and that there was no prior meetings conducted to prepare for the flood. Several rounds of meeting were convened prior to the beginning of the monsoon season with the first meeting chaired by the Deputy Prime Minister himself on 3 January 2014. Following this meeting, the Minister at the Prime Minister’s Department, YB Dato’ Seri Dr. Shahidan bin Kassim chaired a second meeting on 13 October 2014 to further iron out crinkles in the coordination and preparation. A third meeting was later convened at the working level on the same day, chaired by the Secretary of the National Security Council.
For a moment there, I had thought that I was wrong to claim that the Tan Sri Muhyiddin was holding the meeting with NSC for the first time on 27 December, some 10 days after the crisis has started. But I had to chuckle loudly when I read NSC’s denial, which claimed that they had met once already on 3 January 2014 – nearly 1 year ago!
To save the NSC from unnecessary embarrassment, I shall not ask if that particular meeting was actually held to deal with the flood problems in December last year.
I shall only ask, how come it takes some 10 days or more, for the crisis to escalate to mega-proportions with more than 100,000 flood victims evacuated, before the first meeting of the NSC is held? Where is the sense of urgency and crisis in dealing with what NSC has admitted to be a disaster beyond expectations?
The fact that the NSC admitted that there was only an additional 2 meetings held in a single day on 13th October 2014 since a year ago only proved that the NSC clearly did not put great importance or emphasis on managing the annual flood crisis. The severity of this year’s flood only starkly exposed NSC’s lackadaisal preparations and caught the Najib administration with its pants down.
Instead of exonerating the NSC from blame over the weak management of the flood disaster, its own statement proved the need for a detailed public post-mortem once the current crisis is dealt with. It is hence important for us to support both the call by my colleagues, Anthony Loke and Lim Kit Siang, for a emergency parliamentary sitting to debate the crisis and to set up an independent Royal Commission of Inquiry to investigate into the cause and management of the worst natural disaster to hit Malaysia in recent years.