Corruption has just been diagnosed by our scholar monarch in unambiguous candour.
The scourge, in his unnerving disquisition, is at an "undeniably dangerous level". A few rogues may even get away with it, it seems. Sultan of Perak Sultan Nazrin Muizzuddin Shah drives home aloud what the right-thinking public is feeling privately. He plaintively dispensed his landmark decree for what is plain to see. We embrace His Majesty's forthrightness. But first, a throwback on the psyche of this pestilence.
Look closely: the primary offenders are tribal, sectarian and entitled. They demand a predator's share of government largesse and contracts, and concrete slices of the economic cake, undeservingly, at times. As entitlement morphed into greed and "tribal leaders" controlled the government, from human resources to funds disbursement, everyone in the long food chain will scurry for a piece of the action.
The tribe's major players hobnob to steer the billion-ringgit gravy train. The minor players rely on "creative accounting", conjuring million-ringgit contracts from a ministry or agency, and then sub-contracting the work until the actual allocation shrivels unrecognisably, proceeding (if at all) with sub-standard material and a defective facility.
Abusively easy, key officials will pull in a handsome percentage of the kickbacks. When millions of ringgit are so blasé and pay-offs meagre, they corporatise a company, borrow or raise cash with government guarantees, and then skim the top or, what the heck, grab everything on the convenient supposition of "national development".
The abuses, exploitation, bribery, fraud and money laundering work well… if nobody gets sniffed out or caught. Inevitably, they do. The surreal then goes spectacularly prime time.
Why do they do it? In a nutshell, it is the tribe's craze with fast cars, opulent jewellery, luxury timepieces, handbags, glitzy homes and weddings — a narcissistic hunger for money its members can't earn or spend on an honest salary.
Nevertheless, there is a hidden blessing: the narcissistic need to flaunt trappings of mindless wealth, especially on social media. This makes for easier detection, monitoring and possible arrest. In its revolting malleability, this corruption is common knowledge, banally (or sarcastically) understood as the "cost of doing business".
The alternative is nothing could be done, legally anyway. Well, think again. This so-called tacitness is at long-last extirpated, leading to high-powered showy raids, arrests, indictments, trials and convictions.
Feeble justifications to distract the crimes, including the allegedly odd pay-offs to a few big names, was pitched, but Transparency International's censure of our corruption index can't be dismissed as "unrepresentative of the true level of graft". It's still infuriating, especially when what we read, see, hear and experience are far worse. Pandora's Box has opened with a veritable cesspool of curses, punishing us in unaccountable numbers.
Despite the sinking feeling, there is an epiphany that, finally, justice is creaking forward to take down the jobbery. For present and future crooks, hear this: Whistleblowers stalk you and will continue risky exposes for as long as dirty hands pass hush money, and dirtier hands dip into the public kitty.