The incident on the 'removal' of Universiti Malaya Centre of Democracy and Elections director Profesor Mohamad Redzuan Othman is a sad and pathetic reflection of Malaysia's state of non-transparency.

The gravity of it is reflected in a very commendable action by former higher education minister Saifuddin Abdullah in resigning his post in University Malaya in protest at what had happened.

The BN government should be grateful for survey conducted by Universiti Malaya before the 13th general election for predicting poor results for BN, without which BN might have suffered a far worse performance.

It is clear the transformation program is pure window dressing as can be seen in 'Ex-Mr Transparency' - Minister in the Prime Minister's Department in charge of integrity Paul Low's deafening silence on this and other similar issues.

Clearly Malaysia's 35 ministers for a population of 29 million compared to India's 23 ministers for a population of over 1 billion is a manifestation of sheer wastage.

Ministers are just seat warmers like puppets on strings doing their masters' bidding like Low's personal conduct of evicting two Pakatan Rakyat MPs from a recent Auditor-General's Report briefing at Pusat Integrity.

He not only does what he is told, but take great pains to be seen to be doing what he has been told to do by his political masters.

This is the sad state of Malaysia today.'Pusat Integrity' should be renamed 'Pusat Inte-pitiful' for window dressing purposes only!

RAJA KAMARUL BAHARIN ABBAS is PAS' MP for Kuala Terengganu. He was one of the two MPs evicted by Low from the briefing, as Low said it was only for civil servants and media. Low later apologised privately to the MPs.