Rear Window | Swinging trains

Severo Portela

Legislator, entrepreneur and prominent local Fujianese leader, Chan Meng Kam, had a very good week…in spite of an alleged electoral corruption court case running against alleged members of the civic organization that supported his victorious 2013 Legislative Assembly ticket.
Chan Meng Kam punched a hole-in-one, while playing a round at the Chung Shan Spring Golf Club, Zhongshan. Golfing experts usually put the odds of such a clean shot at 250,000 to one.
This earthly achievement happened to resonate much more than his cold assessment of the performance of the new team of CE Policy Secretaries in general, but in particular the Secretary for Transport and Public Works. As a disclaimer we would like to admit that we do not know if a hole-in-one is of such singularity as to deserve dedicated sports-page space, but we are pretty sure that as a generous tipper to caddies Chan Meng Kam qualifies. According to the Southern Metropolis Daily, the Macau golfer spent at least one million HK dollars, showering half of that amount on five caddies.
As a lawmaker and political heavy-weight, Chan, taking the bogged-down in the mud Light Train Rail as the ultimate example of unaccountability, decided to break some china. Chan Meng Kan is not happy with the interminable system in which a discharged official is the person to blame; this way, any current official is not politically answerable. That is why Chan is skeptical of any promises made by any new official, and challenges them on how they intend to address the old and the new problems…in a system of unaccountability; like a spinning-wheel.
However, CMK does not restrict himself to formal generalizations, he goes into specifics. First, he points his finger to a status quo in which local companies without technical expertise are granted the role of the main contractor, opening a cascade of hard-to-monitor subcontractors. Secondly, who is going to challenge the local companies in court? It is exactly on this point that we have difficulty understanding why Chan Meng Kam does not seem happy with the frankness of Secretary Rosário! Perhaps it is precisely the openness with which Secretary for Transport and Public Works faces this technical, financial, legal, and politically nightmarish imbroglio that is the key to a new beginning in the life of the MSAR’s Light Train. Otherwise, all parties involved would be contributing to a culture of suspicion and uncertainty. As we have anticipated in our previous column, the New Macau Democrats’ strategy to move away from hard-core politics to a general-issues agenda is going to pay dividends: Ng Kwok Cheong only asked candidly if the government had already given up on the LTR as the solution to Macau’s growing traffic gridlock! Do not bother to answer it.
Closing note: The Legislative Assembly passed a revision on its Rules of Procedure, halving the maximum period of time (10 to 5 minutes) each bencher can address a plenary session before the formal agenda.
Albeit we disagree with the shortening of the time legislators have to freely speak their minds, we have to regret this happens together with a 20-minute ceiling to introduce a bill. But perhaps worse than cutting the speaker’s time was the very rationale to support the decrease: a) on grounds of the increase in the number of legislators to 33; and b) a quantitative survey on the standard length of speech in the house (4-5 minutes). Pure spin, dressed as “science” as distributive and quantitative measures are want to be, indeed.