“People may have their own views on how GLCs should operate. We respect their right to those views. But in all fairness, we should be evaluated based only on what we say in our Buku Harapan.”

– Former deputy rural development minister R Sivarasa

The kerfuffle over the appointment of Perikatan Nasional (PN) political operatives to government-linked companies (GLCs) is the kind of false narrative that comes when the previous Pakatan Harapan government, now the opposition, demonstrated that the Buku Harapan was not worth the paper it was printed on.

While frontliners risk their lives, this backdoor government is engaging in the same kind of political shenanigans that Harapan was doing when they were in power and the previous BN regime before that.

When activists and NGOs were pushing the government to institute reforms, they were mocked and sidelined by the very same political operatives who relied on them to get their message of “ubah” (change) to a certain section of the rakyat.

It is pretty rich when Amanah central committee member Faiz Fadzil says: “The country will not advance if PN does not implement institutional reforms, let alone making political appointments that are not the people’s choice since the political parties in PN are the ones that lost the last general election.”