Our media would come to nothing if journalists could not hold those in power responsible for defrauding the public interest. The prime minister and his reputation will endure as long as the pro-government media continue to let the embezzlement of taxpayers’ money, and those implicated in the US Department of Justice’s revelations go unchecked nor scrutinised in the news pages.

I know of mainstream journalists ceding control of what they know and write about of the 1MDB fraud to the authorities - much to the disillusionment of veteran editors who realised too late their obligation to their readers.

We do expect our journalists to be acutely aware of their professional duty to tenaciously address matters of public interest, to unravel the truths behind the many cover-ups of public corruption for decades.

Veteran journalists, editors, writers, opinion leaders, public intellectuals - we must all take a stand, even as we grapple with the grey ramifications of the National Security Council Act, which an increasingly authoritarian prime minister would not hesitate to invoke to quell his political demons.

What can we, the people, do the make it right? Amidst the fury and clamour we must continue to demand for a royal commission of inquiry (RCI) into the 1MDB financial theft even if the deputy finance minister thinks an RCI is unnecessary because “everything has been made public”. Bollocks!

We can work with the alternative news portals - like Malaysiakini - and foreign media outlets to ferret out the hidden data and information necessary to bring the embezzlers and frauds to justice.

Let’s eschew from believing in hearsay or raising false flags and imagining all sorts of political conspiracies. Only by revealing compelling anecdotes backed up by facts, data and tested evidence can we effectively mobilise public outrage to force a real response from the sitting government.

Heartlanders must be convinced

All said, the fight for fundamental reforms would sadly come to naught without the direct involvement of the Malays from the heartland. They are the pivotal actors in the nation’s politics. The heartlanders must be convinced that corruption is so deeply entrenched in the system where only the politically connected Umnoputras are getting richer while those in the kampungs are left with the crumbs.

They must believe that they’d be better off with a different prime minister and a new cabinet in place.

That was what a Malay taxi driver said. (I rode with him at KLIA2 when I returned from a trip to Vietnam recently). Listening to the taxi driver’s stories, and what he thought of the prime minister’s alleged corrupt deeds, Rosmah Mansor’s alleged lavish lifestyle, and the public suspicion of the prime minister’s honesty, reinforced what I had written in the past on what it would take to cause a regime change.

Change can only happen if and when the Malays are faced with the truths of alleged entrenched corruption in the government. Regime change, ironically, could be initiated by former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad and former deputy prime minister Muhyiddin Yassin, who has been coaxed to join Mahathir’s new opposition party to contest in the 2018 general election.

Could Mahathir or Muhyiddin, in spite of their tainted past, be the uniting factor in the current fractious opposition alliance? Or could the X factor be someone from outside the political circle, a non-partisan figure?

Conditions are certainly ripe for a progressive people’s movement, and a stronger opposition coalition to recoup and work together towards wrestling the critical seats from Umno in the next general election. The alternative news portals, media activists, civil societies and opinion leaders - you will become more significant as your presence in the national conversation grows stronger in the public sphere.

But, at the end of the day, the mainstream media - television in particular, which is the main medium in the Malay heartland, must get involved in uncovering and undoing what has gone disastrously wrong under the current regime.

We should, however, be prepared for a painful period of arbitrary detention of dissidents under the National Security Council (NSC) Act, and a crackdown on critical journalism under the array of laws that curtail press freedom, particularly the Printing Presses and Publications Act and Communications and Multimedia Act.

ERIC LOO worked as a journalist and taught journalism in Malaysia from the late 1970s to 1986. He is now Honorary Senior Fellow in Journalism at University of Wollongong in Australia. Email: eloo@uow.edu.au