4D Bazaar

I had recently been to the Road Transport Department (JPJ) to settle some details due to my road accident last month. I had gone to the Federal Territories branch at Wangsa Maju. It was there that I saw the sale of numbers for car plates. There were screens that showed the numbers available for sale and their prices, while there were numerous counters set up to handle the sale of these numbers.

This just didn’t sit right with me.

As far as I can tell, the JPJ is a government agency that is tasked with the job of licensing vehicles and drivers. As far as I can tell, it is neither a lottery (4D) seller nor an auction house. However, from the article in TheStar today, the JPJ earned a total of RM445million from the auction of numbers last year alone. People, this is just crazy and open to abuse of power and corruption.

Okay, the JPJ has never been known as a shining beacon of honesty and transparency but this is just so thoroughly open to abuse as it is not open to check and balances. Remember my earlier article about the separation of powers, there are just so many ways that things can go wrong when the people issuing the numbers are also the ones collecting the money. The system really needs to be changed.

The JPJ is not in the job of selling numbers. It’s job is to license vehicles and charge the gazetted licensing fees. It should not be selling off the licenses to the highest bidder. This is the job of an after-market numbers market. Let the private sector handle the sales and transactions just like any other form of sales. The JPJ has no expertise in doing this anyway.

Finally, I think that people should just get smart. This idea of having ‘lucky’ numbers on the car number plates is just dumb. Plain and simple dumb. There is no evidence to suggest that one set of numbers are better than another. If you believe that a certain set of numbers has the magical power of granting you fortune and fame, you deserve to be fleeced of every last sen that you have.

People are dumb.