THE MEMOIRS OF MUSTAPHA HUSSAIN - Malaysia Today

380 Memoirs of Mustapha Hussain
company from going down the drain. The pay was only $250 per month
without any allowance. I travelled daily to and from Batu Kurau, where
the main station was. The company had two main routes and several town
service runs, twelve buses (big and small), four taxis and a petrol kiosk.
It had zero cash reserves and owed money for petrol, repairs, licences,
insurance, wages and cash loans to the tune of thousands. The only cash
flow was its daily collections, which were pitiful.
I sat down with Company Secretary Abdul Ghaffar, a former Malay
Administrative Service (MAS) Officer, to formulate a strategy. We
decided to start paying off small sums to as many different creditors as
possible, especially those who came with threats and abusive language.
Sometimes, we purposely made small errors in writing out the cheques
so we could buy a little time without affecting our credibility. As almost
all petrol sold at our kiosk was on credit, and no one was paying their
bills, we decided to threaten the culprits with legal action. Unfortunately
the board of directors did not approve. To avoid trouble, we leased the
kiosk. A member of the board of directors won the tender.
Next, we found taxi drivers had been treating company taxis as their
own private cars. So, we rented the taxis to them on a monthly basis; at
least now there was some regular company income. After I left the
company, it returned to the old system. New Fords and Chevrolets with
diesel engines were bought, but these cars were later banned from taxi
service. Why didn’t the company think ahead?
The third problem was that employees were not surrendering their
entire collections. So, we introduced a waybill system, where tickets sold,
routes taken and amounts collected were jotted down on the waybills that
were later checked by a clerk. Sometimes I had to make spot-checks on
the conductors, who even lent out money from the collection to friends
who needed some cash. Tickets were not kept in a secure place even
though they were the life of a transport company. One day, I instructed
that tickets before a certain serial number were no longer valid. Soon,
outsiders came to our company surrendering bundles of tickets found in
the bushes, obviously thrown out by conductors who saw no use in
keeping them any more.
Once, I wakened Ticket Inspector Ahmad Shah Baki from his sleep
at 4.30 am, and we drove to Ijok in my car. We stopped along the route,
hid ourselves in the bushes, and waited several hours for the first bus to
come along. Enchik Ahmad Shah climbed onto the bus to inspect the tickets
while I followed from behind in my car. We found that four tickets
bearing the previous day’s dates had been sold as tickets on the day after.
I did not have the heart to press charges so I merely dismissed the con-