Local Counsel - Get tough on illegal posters

MANY Malaysians lack civic consciousness. They frequently break municipal or city council laws. An example is pasting advertisements illegally. Many paste them on sign posts and bus-stop shelters.
Illegal posters are untidy.Kuala Lumpur City Hall has begun to take steps to minimise the indiscriminate pasting of pamphlets, posters and name cards.
It has removed 5,233 illegal advertisements this year. From January 2015 to February 2016, 1,453,164 illegal advertisements were taken down.
The new mayor of Kuala Lumpur is so fed up with the illegal posters that he has been thinking of amending by-laws to allow City Hall to cane those caught pasting them on its property.
In Penang, it was also common to see bus-stop shelters pasted with advertisements of tuition centres and massage parlours. In some places, the shelters were pasted with more than hundreds of name-cards offering "traditional massage".
However, as of May 22, the bus-stop shelters in Glugor and Gut Leboh Cecil, where there are many low-cost flats, are clear of posters. So far, there has been no word about how Majlis Bandaraya Pulau Pinang managed to keep the shelters free of advertisement posters.
Mayors and presidents of local authorities must make it clear to those who do not care about breaking municipal rules that they will be punished for doing so.
If local authorities are still at a loss about preventing the illegal display of posters and banners, they should look to Singapore.
It is useful to recall that Singapore caned an American youth for splashing paint on parked cars in 1994 when Lee Kuan Yew was the prime minister.
Although Lee was condemned by many Americans, including the then president Bill Clinton, for imposing such "barbaric" punishment, he was not apologetic.
Lee said, "Can we govern if we let him off and not cane him? Can we then cane other foreigners or our own people? I am an old style Singaporean who believes that to govern you must have a certain moral authority. If we do not cane him because he is an American, I believe we'll lose our moral authority and our right to govern."
Lee's legacy is still in existence. Singapore is still noticeably clean. According to ECA International's Location Rating System that measures the quality of expatriate living conditions in over 460 locations, Singapore was ranked as the most liveable city in the world in 2015 and 2016.
It is useful to note that Japanese cities are very clean. Even the lorries that collect waste material from houses and shops are kept superbly clean.
Unfortunately, in Malaysia, many locals, foreign workers and visitors have no respect for public property. They could not be bothered about the cleanliness of towns and cities they live in though they keep their own compounds clean.
It may be interesting to recall former prime minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi's comment on "First World infrastructure and third world mentality".
Hopefully, the politicians in Kuala Lumpur do not oppose the dire need to have more serious punishment for those who dirty the city.
Malaysians must learn to be law abiding citizens.
Datuk Dr Goh Ban Lee is interested in urban governance, housing and urban planning. Comments: letters@thesundaily.com