I refer to the Malaysiakini article Are PM’s ‘reform’ bills mere humbug?

Sadly, while trying to salvage a lost reputation, Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi has only exacerbated it and his legacy will be a negative one of lost opportunities and false promises. There is one thing that has been consistent in his time as leader and it is the ability to disappoint.

More than any Malaysian prime minister, he has excelled in letting the people down so often it must now be in Malaysia's Guiness Book of Records. After all you can only judge a tree by its fruit. So no one should take this as a personal attack.

If you are in the public arena and make promises you don't intend to keep, you deserve to be exposed as a fraud. No elected politician can be allowed to get away with silly bills that waste public time and money. People in high positions play high stakes and dupe us big time like the financial fraudsters in the US under investigation now. But who will investigate our high fliers?

It is elementary that if you want to deal with corruption you must place everyone under the power of an independent authority that will work without fear and favour to expose corruption and have it dealt with expeditiously and justly in a proper court of law.

And this authority, composed of eminent persons of integrity, must report to another independent authority. No one should be immune from scrutiny. But as the writer has pointed out, the new anti-corruption agency without any legal teeth to initiate proceedings is anything but a farce.

It is an open cheque book for the one who is prime minister. If he is corrupt, who is there to investigate him? And this is where the 'reforms' fail and at a vital point. The heart of corruption often is at the top where the disease filters down and only a system that brings all under the sphere of possible investigation for corruption will suffice. Or don' t they have corrupt leaders in Malaysia?

In a nutshell, the duplicitous 'reforms' do no more than give more power to the office of prime minister when the remedy should have been the opposite. The 'reforms' are in fact more like the ‘Give More Power to the PM Commission’.

At the heart of all calls for reform in the county is the need for independence, checks and balances, transparency, accountability, integrity and prosecution of the corrupt, among other concerns. But Pak Lah in a hurried and undemocratic manner has done the opposite as only he can.

If PM Abdullah has tried to pull a fast one by a political sleight of hand no one who believes in true reform is duped, as the writer has adroitly argued. Perhaps Abdullah genuinely believes he has done the right thing but one can't help but suspect he must have been asleep or read the wrong bills or simply been plain incompetent.

Or worse, as the writer rightly opines, the 'reforms' are 'dishonest and deceiving' and no one is more a victim of self-deception than Pak Lah himself.

When you have an executive that is under suspicion for corruption and you give the leader more power instead of placing them under the oversight of an independent authority, what can you make of it? That these people are serious about bringing corruption to an end?

The much hyped 'reforms' are a sham indeed because they fail at the most fundamental. Not only are the results disappointing and deceitful, but the process was itself shameful. No public consultation, no proper debate in parliament - only a hasty passing of the bills and hailed by their initiator as a complete success. What was that about a 'third-world mentality'?

Sadly again for something so important, the government ought to have acted more sincerely, wisely and openly and obtained as much good advice from the public. These laws are too important for one man to inflate his ego and rush them through at the eleventh hour of his tenure and at the country's expense.

But this is the sort of behaviour that Malaysians have come to expect from leaders who are so out of touch with the rakyat 's feelings for integrity and checks and balances that they think they can play judge and jury and get away with it.

Riding roughshod over the democratic process itself is a corruption that needs resolution like the other myriad cases of corruption that the Royal Commission into the police revealed. If Pak Lah had wanted to regain our public confidence, he could have rushed through with the establishment of the IPCMC which the public supported.

Frankly it is hard to expect a drowning person to save himself, let alone others and the government should not waste our time trying to dupe us with 'reforms' that are so embarrassingly and glaringly spurious.

With tens of thousands of his people dying of cholera, Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe announces that 'there is no cholera' in the country and the colonialist conspiracy has failed, to the applause of his attentive audience of sycophants.

In Malaysia PM Abdullah declared, "With the setting up of these commissions, we won’t have any corruption and even if there is, it will be very little." Yeah sure.

I wonder if self-delusion is an infectious disease.

Everyone knows that corruption is so terribly endemic and taints even the higherst echelons of the administration and we have seen it not only in the country but in the US.

But instead of a tiger with sharp teeth to hunt out the corrupt, and to ensure that when they are caught to be expeditiously dealt with by a judiciary of equal integrity, Pak Lah has only given us more clouds with no rain, when the people have suffered under a prolonged drought of executive integrity and scandals, and desperately need genuine reforms for the welfare of the rakyat and the country's reputation.

Sadly the new babies of 'reform' are deformed, and the only cure is radical change and you won't have to live with this sort of humbuggery.