A confident government and its administration will understand their obligation to account for and to take responsibility for their actions, which includes (i) adhering to rule of law without abuse of powers, and (ii) serving the public interest in an efficient, effective and fair manner. [World Bank under the title ‘Social Accountability: An Introduction to the Concept and Emerging Practice’, Social Development Paper No 76, Carmen Malena, with Reiner Forster and Janmejay Singh.]

Nicely expressed, as accountability does impact on democratic governance where citizens can assert their rights to demand for information and participation and public actors have an obligation to account.

So when Najib Abdul Razak and his cabinet bypass parliament debate on the report of the royal commission of inquiry on the status of illegal immigrants in Sabah (Sabah RCI), principles of accountability and transparency just went out of the window.

Najib is again unable to take responsibility to explain, clarify, justify and to make available the contents of the Sabah RCI report in parliament. It puts parliamentary democracy in jeopardy as the prime minister shifts the agenda according to his whims and fancies.

But why is the Sabah RCI report so important?

The RCI was set up on Aug 11, 2012 to investigate on status of illegal immigrants in Sabah and received the thumbs up from most Malaysians. The term of reference was to investigate into allegations of illegal registration of immigrants and granting citizenships to them.

The reason for the RCI started with the Likas court case, 8 June 2001, where former Sabah chief minister Yong Teck Lee ( right ) had to vacate his seat after the Kota Kinabalu High Court ruled the Likas constituency electoral roll illegal and accordingly declared null and void the Likas constituency polls.

According to Justice Muhammad Kamil, “the instances of non-citizens and phantom voters in the electoral roll as disclosed in this trial may be the tip of the iceberg. It could not be denied that the registration of voters in the Likas electoral roll was in contravention of the law. No one including the government department is above the law”. However, subsequently the constitution was amended with article 9a, disallowing gazetted electoral roll to be challenged in court.

What was most interesting in the Likas case was that the judge also recognised that “it was common knowledge that an influx of illegal immigrants has plagued Sabah for some years”. This was subsequently confirmed by studies which showed that these illegal registers were able to vote in subsequent state and national elections.

As expected, the Election Commission (EC) did not respond nor took any actions to investigate these allegations.

Project IC/Project M

The influx of immigrants began way before the Likas expose. It begun in the early 1990s after the entry of the United Malays National Organisation (Umno) into Sabah and where it openly competed in its election. However, prior to this, there have been allegations of mass immigration and naturalisaiton of migrants in the 1970s under the United Sabah National Organisation (Usno), and again in 1980s under the Berjaya government.

Hence, responding to pressures to investigate into the problem of alleged phantom voters during elections, the Sabah RCI was established. The evidences revealed at the hearings of the inquiry were damning. They include accusations as follows:

1. Involvement of top level National Registration Department, e.g. chief Abdul Rauf Sani (1990-1992); officers Kee Dzulkifly Kee Abdul jalil, Yakup Damsah, Asli Sidup and others.

2. Political figures were implicated such as former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad’s political secretary, Aziz Shamsuddin.

3. Officers claimed that Sabah National Registration Department (NRD) officers were flown to Sabah to process some 40,000 to 100,000 blue identity cards for immigrants; Kee Dzukifly Kee Abdul Jalil claimed that under operation G17seventeen officers issued some 200,000 birth certificates to immigrants. He said, “ My department chief said there was a letter from the (Sabah) chief minister, Tan Sri Harris Salleh. My department chief told me to give identity cards to people who applied for them over the counter”. The accusation was denied by former chief minister Harris Salleh.

4. Under Ops Durian Buruk, former Sabah NRD deputy chief Mohd Nasir Sugip, NRD officer Asli Sudup and even former Sabah Election Commission chief Wan Ahmad Wan Yusof were involved.

5. Some of the officers like Kee Dzulkifly were detained under the Internal Security Act from 1995 to 1999, an action seemingly to silent the illegal registration.

These illegal registrations were subsequently called Project IC or Project M, referring to Mahathir Mohamad as these alleged incidents occurred during his premiership.

At the Bersih 2.0’s People’s Tribunal (PT), evidence was revealed by the Malaysian Electoral Roll Analysis Project (Merap) to show voters whose old ICs were transferred to another voter and these were part of the Sabah RCI cases.

Recently Merap claimed that they had “identified more than 49,159 voters in the principal electoral roll as of Q4 2012 (which was suppose to be the electoral roll used in GE13) who obtained the dubious IC. Based on GE13 result, 2 parliament seats in Sabah, i.e. Tawau and Beaufort, were won by a majority smaller than the number of dubious voters in the constituency.”

Justice Muhammad Kamil in the Likas case was, therefore, spot on when he said that the EC had abused their powers when they (EC) “took into account not only persons with identity cards for registration but also those with temporary identity cards...” People’s Tribunal judges concurred with this conclusion as they noted that such illegal registration “has far-reaching consequences s it allowed other forms of electoral manipulation to go on unchecked.”

Definitely the Sabah RCI inquiry has raised serious enough concerns for a debate in parliament.

Delayed Sabah RCI is delayed justice

After almost two years, in May 2014 the final Sabah RCI report was submitted by the commission to the Agong and the prime minister. The prime minister declared that it will make the report public in December 2014. Najib and his cabinet has unilaterally decided not to debate in parliament the much-awaited report by the royal commission of inquiry on Sabah.

Much to the chagrin of Malaysians, he arbitrarily set up a special panel, headed by Sabah Deputy Chief Minister Joseph Pairin Kitingan ( right ), to review the findings. The setting-up of another panel to just review the findings is irrelevant as the moving forward approach should be for the parliament to debate the findings and make recommendations on the next steps for implementation.

The indecisiveness in the handling of the Sabah RCI is appalling. Malaysians must see this as another systematic attempt to further delay efforts to deal with not just the issue of illegal registration but with attempts to falsely bloat the citizenship of this country for political gains.

The consequence is much larger as it has implications on future state and national elections.

As the EC embark on the delineation exercise and proposing seat increase, it will have consequences on the boundaries and seats created because these are carried out based on existing electoral roll in Sabah and in many other states where dubious voters still remain. Many questions will remained unanswered as Najib and his administration build walls to genuine people’s engagement.

Parliamentarians, the executive and the judiciary have the responsibility to step in to end this crime and to ensure there will be no future repeats of such actions. Najib must debate the Sabah RCI report in parliament and stop the delineation exercise immediately until electoral rolls are cleaned.

Malaysians must not relent on these demands, otherwise it will mean forgone election results in the 14th and 15th general elections.

MARIA CHIN ABDULLAH is the chairperson for the Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections 2.0 ( Bersih 2.0 ) and the executive director of Empower . She believes politicians are bad masters if not made good servants through free, fair and competitive elections.