COMMENT For some time before the news broke that PKR's Rafizi Ramli was being charged with offences against the Banking and Financial Institutions Act (Bafia), the fact that Prime Minister Najib Razak is an obscurantist posing as a reformer had the status of an open secret.

Anyone with more than a passing knowledge of his career was in on the secret, but given the way political society is configured in Malaysia, even Perkasa chief Ibrahim Ali can be made to seem a born-again liberal should he, with the connivance of the powers-that-be, so desire.

What more, then, the possibilities of transfiguration - from latent obscurantist to liberal poseur - for someone of Najib's pedigree and manifest destiny?