A penny for your thot, a ringgit for your pee

Toilets represent the level of development of a country, said deputy premier Najib yesterday.

How true! A penny for your thought Mr DPM. Just look at our public toilets, your pee might want rush back into your body after looking at the dirty bowls, messy floors and much worse the horrible urine stench.

Surely if you were to use the public toilets to gauge our development, then sadly we are far away from the first world standards aspired by the government.

So how do we overcome this problem? Easy, splash more money into building self-cleaning toilets. And charge the public to regain the cost of maintaining it.

Kuala Lumpur City Hall seem to think this will work. Or not, it would not have invested RM400,000 each on 23 high-tech toilets around the shopping belt in the city.

According to DBKL, these air-conditioned toilets have an automatic seat cleaner that washes, scrubs and dries the bowl after every use. The entire toilet will be cleaned in a similar manner after every five users.

Wow! I am impressed. But still a few things bother me:

Firstly, these new gadget toilets seem to be aimed at giving a clean image to the tourists coming in during the 2007 Visit Malaysia Year - to give the city a cool, high-tech feel. If so, what will happen after 2007? Same old state of disrepair?

Secondly, why charge RM1 from the public? Is it to offset the cost of putting these urinals in the city? Why can’t DBKL just upgrade the present public toilets and maintain them properly?

Thirdly, the authorities seem to be sidetracking the real problem, which is one of public apathy. Public toilet users, sadly most of whom are locals, simply don’t care to keep these public loos clean. Instead of education, or even punishing them through punitive actions, DBKL seem to look the other way and install these self-cleaning toilets.

The implication of this is that DBKL is okay with letting the public soil these toilets as it now has self-cleaning loos that can carry the can for such bad public behaviour.

Surely this matter is not going to be solved by a user paying RM1 to pee. In fact, some users might even try to create a bigger mess simply because they had paid so much to relieve themselves!