Abolition of mandatory death penalty is proof that there are reforms which the Ismail Sabri government could achieve in its short period in office before the 15th General Election

The abolition of the mandatory death penalty had been welcomed by many quarters as a first step in the right direction and is proof that there are reforms which the Ismail Sabri government can achieve in its short period in office before the holding of the 15th General Election.

This is why the Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department, Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar should try to make the 14-day meeting of Parliament from July 18 to August 4, 2022 into a historic Reform Parliament putting on the statute books several reform legislation like the ban on party hopping and the abolition of mandatory penalty.

The claim of the July/August 2022 meeting of Parliament as a “Reform Parliament” will be clinched if parliamentary select committees can play an effective and meaningful roles in parliamentary reforms, including having a parliamentary select committee to launch a new anti-corruption campaign in Malaysia.

This is all the more imperative with the recent court disclosure that the former Chief Secretary to the Government, Mohd Sidek Hassan, received an allowance higher than his official salary for doing nothing as 1MDB advisor.

I agree with the former Health Minister, Dzulkefly Ahmad that “in the name of Integrity and to safeguard the good name of the Enforcement Agency Integrity Commission (EAIC)”, this is the appropriate time for Sidek to tender his resignation as EAIC Chairman.

It would be great step for transparency, accountability and public integrity if Ismail Sabri can make a Ministerial statement in the July meeting of Parliament to disclose all the salaries and allowances of all the heads of the government-linked companies (GLCs) and government-linked investment companies (GLICs), whether 1MDB, Petronas, Khazanah, EPF, Permodalan Nasional Bhd (PNB), Lembaga Tabung Haji (LTH), Lembaga Tabung Angkatan Tentera (LTAT), Axiata Group Bhd, Telekom Malaysia Bhd., Tenaga Nasional Bhd, the National Trust Fund (KWAN), Kumpulan Wang Pesaraan (KWAP), the Ministry of Finance Inc (MoF Inc), Maybank, Sime Darby Bhd., CIMB Group Holdings, MISC Bhd, Proton Holdings or Malaysian Resources Corporation Bhd.

In August last year, the government launched Perkukuh with 20 initiatives to reform Malaysia’s GLCs and GLICs, but sorely lacking was the need to make the GLCs and GLICs models of transparency, accountability and public integrity, as the GLCs and GLICs have been corrupted by politicians - making everyone think that GLCs and GLICs are bad.

I am most concerned to discover that there is more concern in Indonesia than in Malaysia at the state of corruption in these two countries.

In 1995, when Transparency International (TI) first published its first annual Corruption Perception Index (CPI) report, Malaysia was ranked No. 23 and had a score of 5.32 out of 10 points while Indonesia was ranked the last of 41 countries with a score of 1.94 out of 10 points.

In the last 26 years from 1995, Indonesia had made great strides in the war against corruption while Malaysia had regressed.

In the TI CPI 2021, Indonesia is ranked No. 96 with a score of 38 out of 100 points as compared to Malaysia’s rank of 62 and score of 48.

Will Indonesia overtake Malaysia in the TI CPI series at the end of this decade in eight years’ time, as Malaysia’s TI CPI 2022 is expected to be worse both in rank and score than the TI CPI 2021.

A new anti-corruption campaign, the clean-up of the GLCs and GLICs and to ensure that Malaysia does not continue to regress in the war against corruption and prevent the likelihood that Malaysia will lose out to Indonesia in the TI CPI series before 2030 will make the July/August 2022 meeting of Parliament really historic.