Mahathir and his never-ending ‘crooked bridge’
KTEMOC KONSIDERS
FMT – Of crooked bridges and crooked relations by TK Chua(extracts):
Sometimes I am just amazed by the new government and its so-called new resolve. Despite its pragmatism, the issues being considered are myopic and even stupid. I am referring to the “crooked bridge” currently being considered.
TK Chua should have added one more ‘crooked’ description, to wit, ‘crooked thinking’ by the Maddy Bodek-ites.
The government is screaming of humongous debts left by BN and the necessity of severe cutbacks including cancellation of a number of multi-billion ringgit infrastructure projects.
Yet we are now hearing of National Car No 3, man-made island in Middle Rocks and now the resurrection of the infamous Crooked Bridge.
These contradictions in terms are bewildering, annoying and bespeaks of the government’s questionable governance and policies.
TK Chua, the author of letter to FMT wrote:
Singapore has so many dealings with Malaysia. I am sure the republic can be persuaded to replace the causeway with a “normal” bridge to facilitate movement of ships and boats along the Johor Strait. I am sure Singapore could benefit from it too, although the proposal comes from Malaysia.
Building the crooked bridge would just be so uncool. It would permanently epitomise the crooked relationship between Malaysia and Singapore, showing that both Malaysia and Singapore are governed by intransigent and hard-headed people out to get each other.
Obviously TK Chua might not be aware of the proposed ‘crooked bridge’ saga. The reason why it was designed to be crooked by Mahathir and his cohorts was because Singapore had previously NOT agreed to altering the current causeway into a bridge.
The Sings saw no benefit to the Island State and thus said ‘NO’. As to be expected, the usual Mahathir angry response as then-PM was to do what he WANTS on the Malaysian side as he wished. Thus the birth of the proposed ‘crooked bridge’ came about.
I had to admit it’s actually quite a bit of clever design for Mahathir to get his way, where Malaysia’s bridge would ‘meander’ in order to gain height because of the short span, in order to enable vessels to sail safely under. The design was so to avoid abrupt and steep climbing and descent gradient of the otherwise ‘short’ Malaysian bridge.
Thus a ‘crooked bridge’ could join the Singapore part of the Causeway, providing a continuous physical link (presumably inclusive of water supply) between the two nations – the Malaysian part being the ‘crooked bridge’ and the Singapore part being the old Causeway.
Yessir, the idea was to leave Singapore’s half as the original causeway while Malaysia’s half would be a bridge. International laws and legality became moot points once former PM AAB kaput-ised it.
AAB cancelled the project due to its impracticality (international laws-relationship, etc) when Singapore has refused to cooperate, whilst the cost was skyrocketing at that time.
Wakakaka, at that time Anwar Ibrahim who was still on the outer but still very keen to return to Mothership, offered his finance ministerial expertise to AAB to ‘negotiate’ with Singapore.
After gently chiding AAB for not doing his homework on the matter of the crooked bridge, Anwar poured on luscious honey for AAB by expressing full support for the latter’s decision to abandon the project as a commendable decision, crooning:
“It takes a lot of courage and wisdom … after weeks of massive campaigns against Singapore … (for Abdullah) to suddenly say that the decision (to build the bridge) was faulty and that we have to scrap the project…it’s commendable.”
Naturally Anwar blamed Mahathir (wakakaka) for sending Daim Zainudin to negotiate with former Singapore prime minister Lee Kuan Yew over the terms of the project, openly pontificated:
“I would grant the criticism of many that negotiations with Singapore are not always easy. The solution therefore is to send competent people to negotiate. If you send semi-literates to negotiate, we will lose out in the negotiations.”
