COMMENT When you are a public official, political appointee or not, you serve the public trust, and as members of the government of the day its true that you execute policies, but your loyalty is to the people and the state, embodied in the royal authority of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong.

Your loyalty does not lie with the person who appointed you. Far from it! Your very task is, at times, to act as a check on the executive.

Your loyalty does not lie with the particular political party that happens to head the present executive governance. Far from it! Your duty is to ensure public interests always outweigh political considerations, or at least attempt to make it so.

More so when you are appointed by the Agong to serve the rakyat, which is why such a position is known as 'public official' or 'public servant' in the first place.

The job of public servants is not to ensure the re-election of the party in power, for that is the business of politicians.

The job of public servants is not to defend the powers that be by all means, but to use all means to ensure the powers that be stay within the lines of the authority accorded them, and not go beyond it.

Which is why in most countries practising parliamentary democracy, the attorney-general, the auditor-general and other senior posts are given due autonomy from the executive and report to Parliament instead.

Reciprocal respect

While you are human, when it comes to your office, all decisions and actions that you execute and make are open to public scrutiny, and when you muck it up, those should also be open to public ridicule, oversight and commentary.

After all, you are a public official. Once again the emphasis is on "public".

When you muck things up or act as a servant to powers that be instead of to the public, you have abandoned your loyalty not only to the rakyat but also to the Agong, and this is in the purest sense a severe dereliction of duty.

When you kow-tow to the powers that be, you no longer deserve reciprocal respect from the people, who both deserve and expect better from those who are supposed guardians of their collective interests.

So, if you go after the messengers, hoping to silence public outcry, you are making things worse and making those who already know of your culpability to cry louder.

The criticisms might not be pleasant to the ear of the public officials concerned, but it is likewise so for the rakyat when they see how their interests are being abandoned for whatever worldly things that those who once served the public are getting in return.

In any case, public officials who muck things up and mess with the public trust should not be too thin-skinned to direct harassment upon the messengers of public sentiment.

After all, words, unlike sticks and stones, will not break their bones.

If they can bear to stay in office after having done things they should not have done and still appear before the public as if nothing is wrong, then they should be thick-skinned enough to endure one or two words of insult from an exasperated public.

HAZLAN ZAKARIA is a member of Team Malaysiakini.