KUALA LUMPUR – The cause of the breakdown of the LRT Kelana Jaya line service could be an act of sabotage, said Prasarana Malaysia Bhd’s first chief executive officer (CEO) Datuk Ridza Abdoh Salleh.
He told The Vibes that the automatic train control (ATC) failure between Ampang Park and Kelana Jaya stations could have been due to the unhappiness among the layers of staff within Prasarana.
“I don’t know whether it is linked to the upcoming general election, but I do not rule out the possibility of sabotage,” he told The Vibes.
He was responding to a theory by an industry observer on the allegation of sabotage to the extent that the management has been unable to pinpoint the exact cause of ATC failure.
Two days ago, Prasarana president and group CEO Mohd Azharuddin Mat Sah had announced that the company’s engineers were unable to diagnose the issue affecting the ATC following several disruptions since Saturday.
As a safety measure, Rapid Rail Sdn Bhd took drastic action on Wednesday by suspending the Kelana Jaya line for seven days, a move that will affect nearly two million Klang Valley commuters.
Caretaker transport minister Datuk Seri Wee Ka Siong is expected to address issues surrounding the breakdown at a press conference later this morning.
Ridza, meanwhile, said the probable act of sabotage could be due to the years of animosity at the middle and lower level of personnel in the state-owned public transport conglomerate.
“As I stated in my note in LinkedIn this week, we have layers of people in Prasarana with the top people earning a lot of money and the bottom people are earning not so much, and it (has) created animosity,” he added.
“It is possible when you don’t look after the (lower-ranked) staff morale,” he said. “They hold the spanner, the screwdriver, nut, and bolts.”
Ridza, who helmed the Putra LRT team and Prasarana top post for seven years, said these human resources issues could have created some unhappy engineers or technicians.
“This could be the result of an unhappy working environment for quite a while and now it is showing,” he said.
He also said the absence of a succession plan within the organisation is another factor in creating a grim work culture.
“With zero succession planning, we put (in) the wrong people,” he said.
“For example, we can’t simply put an IT expert from Sime Darby into Prasarana or a finance executive from a bank into Prasarana’s top management, while staff are not elevated to the key positions,” said Ridza.
In his note on LinkedIn, Ridza had said that Prasarana is a very complex organisation which employs a wide range of professionals.
“Having too many layers at the top consuming big fat salaries is not only creating unnecessary red tape and bureaucracy but also can cause animosity among the staff.”
Ridza said he had previously spoken of ideas on the kind of overhauling that Prasarana needs.
“Prasarana or RapidKL is not a place to earn fat salaries and do nothing. Everyone, from top to bottom, must dedicate themselves to work tirelessly. It is because LRT operations never stop 365 days a year, including Christmas or Hari Raya.
“Having meetings in an air-conditioned room is a temporary adventure. The real test is when 16 stations are closed, as announced (that day).
“I am not blaming the current management, but I hope the management and the board will take my hint seriously if we want to prevent similar failures from happening in the future,” he had written on LinkedIn on Wednesday.
Speaking to The Vibes, Ridza also lamented the reliance on foreign experts from Toronto and Istanbul to resolve the crisis.
“I have full confidence in the local experts. Now, they (Prasarana team) said they can’t find the cause and solve the crisis by themselves. I don’t understand it since we’ve been running the system for 25 years. This is about managing,” he said.
“I am sharing what I know based on my experience developing from scratch and running the LRT service for seven years.
“Back then, we even had more problems from the beginning than today, and we overcame it with grit and we learned the hard way. We designed the system and even the designer was sceptical of how it was going to work.
“We had a lot of problems, but we learned it ourselves. We were self-trained. We didn’t go overseas to learn everything, and I didn't allow anyone, including myself, to go overseas, including for conferences for four years.
“Everybody stayed put, worked hard and understood the whole system. We broke even and made some profit in operations when we started the Putra LRT,” he wrote.
He pointed out that he doesn’t blame the current Prasarana president and group CEO, Mohd Azharuddin Mat Sah.
“Azharuddin only inherited the system. I am criticising the culture, the way we look at things.” – The Vibes, November 11, 2022
