Long-term vision: Comm Mohd Shuhaily says he has asked the Prime Minister to transform AKPS into a full-fledged security force. — AZHAR MAHFOF/The Star
PETALING JAYA: Tasked with cleaning up Malaysia’s porous entry points and years of entrenched corruption, Malaysia Border Control and Protection Agency (AKPS) director-general Datuk Seri Comm Mohd Shuhaily Mohd Zain is under no illusion about the enormous job he has inherited.
In an interview with The Star, Comm Mohd Shuhaily spoke about the challenges of leading AKPS, an agency formed just over a year ago to safeguard the country’s entry points and stamp out corruption, especially involving the very personnel entrusted to enforce it.
He said that although AKPS was formed with reform in mind, it has inadvertently inherited personnel, systems and practices shaped by decades of compromise, coercion and collusion.
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“We are inheriting all these, and I cannot make them disappear overnight. Perhaps I can scrape it down and reduce it slowly. If they stop, that would be good,” said the straight-shooting officer.
He also said he had made a request to Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim to transform AKPS into a full-fledged security force, complete with firearms, similar to the police and the military.
“In law enforcement, formality matters. Respect comes from structure and discipline,” he said.
“Currently, many orders are ignored because there are no consequences to face from defiance.
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“I have ordered enforcing stricter routines, but the personnel still report to their own agencies.
“Until there is unified command and clear authority, real discipline and accountability will not take place,” he said, adding that this would also enable AKPS to undertake investigations as an independent agency.
On prevailing corrupt practices among enforcement officers, Comm Mohd Shuhaily revealed that while some personnel were the root of it, others were drawn into it simply to survive within the system.
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“If you do not play ball, you will not be accepted. If you’re not accepted, how do you survive? You have a family to feed.
“This is how you go from affording a Myvi to suddenly driving a Civic,” he said, adding that “cleaning up” the system would take years due to legal processes, court timelines and manpower gaps.
“You can only dismiss someone after the court decides so. These are the real dilemmas we face.”
On the principles that guide him in carrying out his duties, Comm Mohd Shuhaily said his outlook was shaped by his late father Mohd Zain Ismail, who was also a policeman.
He recounted a conversation with his father on this matter and about a long-standing culture of not wanting to “put sand in someone else’s rice bowl”.
“I asked him how many of the delinquent ones he had acted on when he was given the power and the chance to change things.
“My next question to him was simply this: Whose rice bowl is this? Is it his bowl? So he has to close it. Why do you have to close it?
“I understand that people make mistakes. Nobody is perfect, but what is the threshold to say enough is enough? So that is where I need to put a stop.
“My time is short, with just another six years or less if I decide to leave earlier. I do not want to retire carrying regrets. Instead, I want to retire with my head held high and say that I have tried.
“Even if I failed, at least I tried,” Comm Mohd Shuhaily said.
Recounting his posting about a decade ago as the district police chief in Teluk Intan, he witnessed how firm enforcement could quietly change the lives of the people around in many ways.
He cited the time when a shopkeeper he had met thanked him for wiping out illegal gambling in the district, as parents had started showing up at his store to buy school supplies for their children.
“So you see, without even realising it, when you do one good thing, it ripples out and benefits many others,” Comm Mohd Shuhaily said.
Despite the scale of the challenge, he said he is not giving up, expressing faith that divine intervention would ultimately ease the task.
