I refer to the Malaysiakini report Zam: Not true! Merbok didn't reject me.

Without a doubt, Information Minister Zainuddin Maidin (Zam), who had been using the RTM as his personal propaganda tool, is a classic example of the 'power corrupts' saying and let us hope that the people of Sungai Petani in Kedah will teach him a lesson by voting for the PKR man Johari Abdul.

I am of course referring to Zam's arrogant statement on nomination day during which he said he would make sure that Johari loses his deposit of RM10,000. RM10,000 may be small change to Zam and he should at least appreciate the fact that there are still a lot of Malay professionals who are fed up with Umno and are still willing to fight it within this lopsided democratic process.

Is this the talk of a man who is supposed to believe in democracy and who began his working life as a lowly stringer for Utusan Melayu (now Malaysia) who must have chased buses and taxis to cover local events for the paper?

If Zam has any intelligence he should know that in the US, Britain, Australia and other mature democracies, all the parties are part and parcel of the whole democratic package so that the people will always have an alternative government.

Maybe Zam thought that Umno was 'chosen' by Allah to have the monopoly of wisdom and power and the right to misuse public funds. We are glad to see that Johari is no petty trader but a former senior public servant who knows a thing or two about fighting an election. My guess is Johari had to leave the civil service because he could no longer stand all those 'clowns' (the ministers) who instead of functioning as policy-makers (even that with a lot of help from the civil servants) had most of the time become deal-makers for their cronies.

Along the line if anything goes wrong they will always blame the civil servants or worse, forced them to become their fall guys.

The people of Sungai Petani are now watching VCDs of Zam's irrational reaction to Al Jazeera and his disgraceful standard of English. For a man who often quoted Peter Drucker instead of verses from the Al Quran and Hadith, Zam should be ashamed of himself,

Only last year Zam - who is no longer a journalist - had unashamedly accepted award of Wartawan Negara. During his journalistic career at Utusan Zam was astute enough to make his luck thus despite a meagre education, he found himself as senator, deputy information minister and then full minister for information.

Surprisingly, Pak Lah was willing to retain this Mahathir card-carrier perhaps because he is a better 'gasbag' than his predecessor, Abdul Kadir Sheikh Fadzir, another Mahathir hand-kisser.

As Information Minister, Zams daily preoccupation is how to compete with Media Prima's TV3 and its siblings, which, funny enough, are owned by Umno.

Another hilarious part of this tale is that Zam and the New Straits Times boss Kalimullah Hassan (one of Pak Lah's confidant) can't stand the sight of each other (perhaps due to one thinking he is a greater intellect than the other) and thus Zam became a friend of (the MCA-owned) Star.

At RTM, Zam is not only 'destroying' the Malays with massive hiburan programmes, he is also betraying Bahasa Melayu as Bahasa Kebangsaan. While RTM is wasting vast sums of money Zam has just allowed Bernama, the national news agency, to waste more public funds by launching Radio 24 and Bernama News TV.

With Astro launching ‘Oasis’ (an Islamic channel) and Awani (a news and current affairs channel) RTM has become quite irrelevant and a waste of public funds unless RTM can function like the BBC, Australia's ABC, or Japan's NHK which are truly voices of their rakyat.

The people of Sungai Petani now have a good chance to make history by rejecting this man who was already shown the door by the people of Merbok.