Redundancy

Redundancy is defined as additional capacity which is not being economically utilised. Therefore can be done away with.

Well, that is just one of the many definitions we can use to describe redundancy. Unfortunately, that is how most of us Malaysians understand the meaning of redundancy.

Deny as you may, you get to see that a lot being used in our lives. These would be extreme examples, so do please take it with a pinch of salt, bucketful if you want.

Whenever our govt plans for a new project, noise makers (if you feel I'm talking about you, might as well stop reading from here) often lament that we do not require such capacity and we have yet to have the volume to support such capacity. Nice, sounds like someone that cares how our govt spend our tax monies.

That was what they had said about Penang Bridge. That is what they had said about North-South Highway. Today, they not only get a second bridge for Penang, but are asking for a tunnel to connect the island to the mainland.

No wonder when it comes to our defence procurement, they could not accept large defence expenditure ticket. For them, we are not going to use them for war. They will claim these are wastage, that the same amount of money can be used to build x number of hospitals and x numbers of KLCC which could be better utilised to provide amenities to the public.

This mentality has indirectly been implanted in the minds of our be an-counters in Ministry of Finance, only willing to purchase defence equipment that is just sufficient to protect Peninsular Malaysia. Oh ya, no wars, right?

Yet, when our nation faces actual threat, these are the people who would severely criticize our armed forces for failure to defend our nation from threats. And likely to run off when shit starts to hit the fan. No wonder the Americans have this term REMF. Go Google it yourself.

But remember this instead. In my dictionary, redundancy means additional capacity put in place to ensure if any single component, be it organic or mechanic, fail to perform it's task sufficiently, would be replaced by these additional capacity.