It seems that there's a lot of debate with regards to how much our ministers should be paid. Everyone seems to think that ministers are overpaid, besides the ministers themselves with Najib Razak telling the rakyat not to begrudge the ministers for what they have as they are relatively underpaid.

In my ideal country, ministers would be paid a healthy dose, like they would receive in private companies. The PM of Malaysia, being the leader and manager of a country of more than 25 million people, deserves to be paid in the millions.

It is easy to argue that people become politicians to serve the people, rather than make a fortune and thus should not be paid an obscene amount. I beg to differ. It is no secret that the best brains

aren't in government.

It doesn't matter if you want to serve the people but if you work twice as hard as you would in the private sector, get a bunch of largely unappreciative public who criticise you every chance they get, and you retire with a lowly pension while your peers as CEOs of private companies drive around in big BMWs, it isn't hard to see why the best minds aren’t in politics.

I think people should be paid their worth and without question, a job like the PM’s or the finance minister’s should be worth a lot more. After all they are not one of the rakyat and they shouldn't be. I want the best leading the country, and sadly the average rakyat is just that - average.

To continue the discussion, I'll first have to digress and explain my views on what makes a good leader. Most people thinks that a good leader is one who makes the right decisions. I think that is overly simplistic. Very few things in life are clearly right or wrong. Most of the time, they have their pros, cons and everything in between.

My idea of a good leader is not one who makes the right decision, but one who completely understands the impact of his/her decision and has sound reasons to back it up.Under this definition, the leaders of BN fail terribly.

A classic example of this is our National Service programme. It was virtually dreamt out of nowhere by Mahathir and Najib and implemented overnight .Questions go a-begging to be answered: is national service the best way to promote racial integration? Do we have enough resources to effectively carry out the programme?

Do we have enough trained personnel to carry out the programme? Would the results be diminished if we only randomly select 25% of the population to participate? If so, how significantly? Does it still justify the expenditure? Is there a better way to spend the money that will yield higher returns?

Are there plans to increase the participation rate to 100%? If so, in what time frame? Is three months long enough to achieve the desired effect? Would it be better if we had 100% participation rate for one month? What about students who have out of the norm study schedules? Should we introduce reforms for our education system since the need of NS obviously points to a glaring weakness in our education system?

One would hope that a programme like national service that's non-trivial in terms of money spent and directly affecting members of the rakyat would have gone through thorough thought before being implemented. And one would pray hard that a decision was arrived at through painstaking research and sound advice from well-known educators.

A programme like NS is never going to be right or wrong for everybody. But I'll feel a lot better if I knew that our leaders have indeed explored all options, weighed all pros and cons, consulted all experts before arriving on the decision.

Sadly, it most certainly does not seem to be the case. If people like Najib does not do all this thinking that we pay him to do, what makes him think he is worth whatever salary he is being paid?

And NS isn't the last issue either. When inflation occurred, subsidies were handed out in liberal doses, with little thought of its long-term impact. When BN suffered a set back in the elections, every politician rushed to set up blogs, thinking that the magical thing called the Internet was the sole reason why they lost in the election.

A second factor to my objection of the current salary for ministers in Malaysia is the monopoly of power.

I'll agree to pay bucket loads of money for someone truly outstanding to lead the country only if I can kick him out if he is incompetent. Just like how a CEO of a private company can be sacked if he fails to perform. Unfortunately, this is not the case in Malaysia.

Everyone knows that open and fair elections is a joke in this country. The ruling party has set up a complex instrument to prevent themselves from ever being kicked out of power.

They won’t be kicked out with the ruling party having a majority share in the country's major media companies, its liberal use of the ISA, the abuse of the police force for political means, a complete lack of freedom of speech and a cabinet that can ‘suggest’ how elections are carried out etc.

The act of locking everyone else out of that position of power and showering themselves in cash while they are at it is just immoral. So yes, I guess that is my rather lengthy answer to Najib's argument that ministers are paid peanuts.