Amin Khairuddin| January 5, 2015
Free Malaysia Today

Blogger Shahbudin says Najib shouldn’t have acted like someone with something to hide.

KUALA LUMPUR: Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak would have saved himself a lot of embarrassment if he had been open about his recent movements instead of behaving like a thief, Umno critic Shahbudin Husin writes in his latest blog entry.

Continuing with his series of caustic blog entries that comment on Najib’s unannounced Hawaiian holiday and the mystery of what happened to the private government jet after he cut short the golfing vacation, Shahbudin says it is odd that the Prime Minister apparently did not count on the Internet’s power to turn any Tom, Dick or Harry into a reporter when he himself has often spoken about that power.

He says the one lesson Najib must learn from the episode is that he, as a prime minister and very public figure, has to be transparent about everything in these times of instant information and open communication.

“If he had not left for his Hawaiian Christmas holiday in secret and had instead released information that he would be playing golf with Barack Obama, no one would have really cared when the picture of him golfing with the American President became widely distributed,” he writes.

“If he had returned in the same aircraft that took him to Hawaii when the flood situation had become frantic, no one would have really bothered to trace the whereabouts of the official plane.” Read the rest of this entry »