Malaysia has this week achieved the dubious international dishonour of being named the third most corrupt country in the world because of Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s RM2.6 billion donation and RM55 billion 1MDB twin mega scandals.
This has busted Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Zahid Hamidi’s claim that Malaysia wants to be the top 30 by 2020 as a non-corrupt country, as with Malaysia ranked third with the world’s “worst corruption scandals in 2015”, as nobody believes that the goal of Malaysia becoming the top 30 out of some 200 countries in the world in 2020 in terms of being least corrupt is within the realm of reality or practicability.
When Najib became Prime Minister in 2009, one of his major policy initiatives was the National Transformation Programme in which anti-corruption was one of the primary agendas.
Some seven years later, Najib’s National Transformation Programme proves to be a great failure when it suffered an irreparable damage as Malaysia was named third place in the ForeignPolicy website ranking of the world’s “worst corruption scandals in 2015”.
One of the National Transformation Programe’s efforts in its anti-corruption programme is the “Name and Shame” project, and as of last year, the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) has displayed over 700 people convicted of corruption on its database, which is accessible to the public on the MACC website under “Name and Shame”.
Not a single one of the over 700 names on the MACC’s “Name and Shame” website, however, could have caused Malaysia to be named in the third place of the world’s “worst corruption scandals in 2015”.
This means that the person who should lead off the MACC’s “Name and Shame” website is none other than the Prime Minister because of his twin mega scandals, which have brought unprecedented shame and dishonour to Malaysia.
Will MACC rectify its website and add Najib’s name into its “Name and Shame” listing – in fact, placing Najib at the very top of the list, as no one in Malaysia could come near him in terms of the scale and magnitude of the corruption scandals, with not only national but international dimensions as well?
Furthermore, Najib has also the dubious reputation as the only Malaysian Prime Minister to be investigated by the US Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) under the US Kleptocracy Assets Recovery Initiative 2010!
(Speech at the DAP Kulai ‘kopitiam ceramah” at Bandar Putra, Kulai on Sunday, 3rd January 2016 at 12 noon)