Junkets, ego trips & official visits
It goes without saying that not all visits are as productive as they are publicly made out to be though no prime minister would ever admit it. Indeed, I never met a prime minister or minister who wasn’t impressed with his own performance during such visits.
Dennis Ignatius
[1] Opposition leaders are hammering away at the prime minister over his remarks in parliament that nearly 80% of the costs of his recent visits abroad were covered by private companies.[1]
[2] Actually, such arrangements are not new. It is normal practice for businessmen to accompany the prime minister on official visits. When Dr Mahathir Mohamad visited China towards the end of 1985, some 200 businessmen accompanied him. Those who join are usually required to pay for their share of the costs, particularly if a chartered flight is involved. In this sense, there is nothing untoward about the prime minister’s statement that the private sector subsidised his recent visits.
[3] It only become an issue because PMX tried to make it out to be something that was unique to his administration – one of the measures introduced under his administration to ensure the efficient management of expenses for official overseas visits, to quote the NST. “We did things differently recently, as I noticed that travel costs were often quite high”, he was quoted as saying. Of course, it was misleading, to say the least.
[4] PMX is often is his own worst enemy; his obsessive need to constantly preen his own feathers gets him into all sorts of unnecessary controversies. He then digs himself deeper into the hole by blaming everyone else for his own missteps.
[5] How effective these visits are or what actual benefits are derived from them is of course something else. All prime ministers boast about the millions if not billions of contracts and investments that were secured during their visits. Mostly, it is just hot air; it is not for nothing that Malaysia has a well-deserved reputation for being a world leader in signing MOUs. If all those MOUs were real investments, Malaysia would be an industrial superpower by now.
[6] Prime ministers like to be accompanied by businessmen particularly on visits to developing countries to make themselves look good in the eyes of their hosts, many of whom have unrealistic expectations of what Malaysia can do for them.
[7] When Mahathir visited Peru in the 1990s, the whole country was giddy with talk about how Malaysia was going to boost the economy with multimillion dollar investments. Malaysian tycoons arrived in Lima in four or five different private jets; the country had probably not seen so many private jets parked at the airport before and were understandably excited. Nothing ever came out of all the MOUs that were signed though it did burnish the credentials of Dr Mahathir as a Third World leader of some repute.
