Zahid's NFA gives new meaning to reform

 

Malaysians will recall the time when Ahmad Zahid Hamidi singled out Malaysiakini reporters and told them that he was "watching them".

We remember the moment when he proudly boasted about his links with the Malay triad "Tiga Line". We were shocked when he said that he looked forward to the day when tahfiz school students would become cabinet members and lead the country.

Today, with the Attorney-General’s Chambers announcing “no further action” (NFA) on Zahid’s corruption-related charges, followed by Zahid moving to convert his discharge not amounting to an acquittal (DNAA) into a full acquittal, the government has revealed what reform now means: closure without accountability, legality without legitimacy, and stability purchased at the expense of justice.

Today, many of us will feel that the Madani administration has crossed that line when prosecutorial discretion replaced judicial truth, and Malaysians are asked to accept Zahid's NFA as reform.

This is the moment when patience stops being a virtue and becomes complicity. This is no longer about guilt or innocence, because that question was never allowed to reach a proper conclusion.

For many Malaysians, Zahid’s NFA feels less like legal closure and more like a betrayal of the Pakatan Harapan coalition’s GE15 promises on governance and the rule of law.

What matters is how the system behaved, when it acted, and who benefited. Forty-seven charges, involving criminal breach of trust, corruption, and money laundering, were never tested before a judge. There was no verdict, no public scrutiny, just administrative finality.

Malaysians are told the evidence is “insufficient” after “further investigations” and “internal prosecutorial assessments”. Really?

If the evidence was weak, why were charges filed? Why did the case progress to defence? Why did insufficiency become definitive only when political circumstances made it convenient? These are not conspiracies, but legitimate questions any member of the rakyat, who values the rule of law, would ask.

How many million ringgits did the Malaysian government waste in pursuing this case, which we are not shocked that it ended nowhere?

How much of the nation's resources were wasted in manhours, such as the court's time, lawyers’ fees, judges, researchers, security detail, witnesses, gathering evidence, police time, and other necessary preparations needed to go to trial? Have we so much money to fritter away?

Obvious pattern

The DNAA, to NFA, to a full acquittal pipeline, exposes the gap between process and principle. The case hasn’t been fully tested in court, but it is moving step by step toward being cleared entirely without a trial.

At least on paper, it looked like the law was being followed. However, the ethical or moral purpose of justice has not been fulfilled.

As the attorney-general has decided to drop the case, it is effectively closed for now. It is sickening when the powerful protect the powerful. As their cases simply drag on, for them, delay is a defence. Put simply, the long waiting time protects powerful people.

Discretion is absolution because, as we have seen, the prosecutors’ choices let powerful figures avoid legal consequences. Time provides a protective shield for the political elite.

The government claims institutions are independent, but only when it furthers their agenda. When it doesn’t, independence vanishes into thin air. It is disgusting how the government treats the AG’s decision not to continue the Zahid case as untouchable; more importantly, it refuses to challenge it.

Ordinary Malaysians who question these decisions are ignored or told their concerns don’t matter. This is a recipe for disaster for Malaysia, because we see clearly what is happening when institutions move decisively against the weak and tiptoe cautiously around the powerful.

The pattern is obvious. The public anger that persists is justified.

Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s silence compounds the failure. This was the moment for transparency, for moral leadership, for insisting on open judicial scrutiny.

Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim

Instead, quiet acceptance signals that reform has limits, and those limits appear to be determined by political necessity, selfish personal agendas and not principle.

Stark contrast

Meanwhile, Malaysians are shown selective economic indicators, investor confidence, and market optimism, while families write about shrinking pay cheques, rising prices, and the daily arithmetic of survival. The contrast is stark: if you have capital, you can thrive; if you do not, you are told to endure.

We are inundated with messages that the economy is doing well, political stability matters, but deep down in society, the cost of crisis living bites. Many are suffering. The rewards from a thriving economy have not yet filtered down to the masses.

Growth that reassures investors while normalising hardship is not progress. If you're a successful exporter of electronic items, life is great. A reform agenda that asks the struggling majority to wait patiently while the powerful are quietly unburdened has lost its moral compass.

When Zahid said that “truth has prevailed”, the question is: whose truth, determined by whom? In a democracy, truth is tested in court, not in private evaluations. What has prevailed is not truth because we saw that it is finality without judgment.

The law may have been followed, but reform was never about doing the bare minimum legally. It was about restoring trust in how power is exercised. On that measure, the Madani government has failed.

If the price of reform is silence, then it was never reform at all. The Madani administration needs to be reminded that reform belongs to the people who refuse to stop demanding it. - Mkini

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MARIAM MOKHTAR is a defender of the truth, the admiral-general of the Green Bean Army, and the president of the Perak Liberation Organisation (PLO). Blog, X.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of MMKtT.