By Azmi Anshar

IT'S a human construct that if you borrow money from a bank or any lending institution, you have to repay it -- with pre-negotiated interest, whether in usury or a "service fee".

The consequences of defaulting repayment would mean one of the following: lose collateral, agitate a guarantor who may or may not be able to make payment, bankruptcy, forfeiting future borrowing prospects, being blacklisted and losing face.

Look up the newspapers' bankruptcy notices and you'll notice that many Malaysians fall into this dejected category.

Then there's the other wretched category of desperation: borrowers who ignore the perils of taking money from a loan shark and inevitably defaulting.

The consequences are harsher: first your car or your home is dabbed with an ignominious paint job, followed by a few cracked ribs for good measure.

If repayment is still deficient, then you or your family members may get abducted and caged like a dangerously injured animal.

If repayment to these savages is still not forthcoming, then you're likely to swim with the fishes.

Or you could get a stay of execution by whimpering your plight to Datuk Michael Chong and cry foul of ill treatment by the loan sharks, and hope that Chong's reputation can appease the sharks and allow you to slink away without paying a sen.

However, a third non-punitive and non-threatening category of borrowing seems to have emerged where borrowers are given plenty of money but face soft recriminations if they ignore repayment: study loans given by a government agency, specifically the Skills Development Fund Corporation, which laments that it is RM463.68 million($189.5million) in the red due to defaulters.

The agency, Deputy Human Resources Minister Senator Datuk Maznah Mazlan exhorted to the Dewan Rakyat yesterday, was taking action -- sending out payment notices and reminders, setting up mobile collection counters and setting up of a payment collection committee. To do what the good senator did not articulate.

If these dawdling reactions aren't bad enough, Maznah posited the idea of converting the loans into scholarships if the borrowers were excellent students. In that case, we hope all 57,000 borrowers qualify.

This is a classic case of indolence: the agency is unable to collect repayment of RM463.68 million in loans given out to 57,000 students. Just what is the agency's problem?

After all, the SFDC is not actually demanding payment in full but a reasonable and affordable repayment scheme. Even that has failed.

A decade back, one student loan agency, while reluctant to implement punitive action, came out with a moxie move: they plastered the names of all defaulters in the newspapers. Many of the delinquents paid up in a huff.

So why won't the SFDC simply expose the defaulters? It might just boil down to political correctness and an angry backlash from parents who demand that the agency strictly observe the convenient custom of not humiliating your own people.

For now, the SDFC has to be tough because the black financial hole is no small change: the agency must emulate the way banks pursue loan delinquents. Pay up or get ready to be totally embarrassed.