Dennis Ignatius
~ Provoking discussion, dissent & debate on politics, diplomacy, human rights & civil society.
When a palace becomes a prison
11WednesdayNov 2026
Posted in corruption, justice, Politics
[1] So Najib has gone home to serve the rest of his sentence in his palatial Taman Duta residence, now conveniently gazetted as a prison. He will remain there until August 2028. The Prisons Act has been put to work for a prison of one. No other inmate in the land has enjoyed such consideration.
[2] I share the frustration and disappointment of so many. But what I feel most is a mixture of anger and despair. First, there is the anger at the injustice of it all. Here is a man who abused the highest elected office in the land, brought great shame upon our country and robbed its people of so much. He has never admitted his guilt, never shown a moment’s remorse. And yet he is to serve his sentence in a comfort most Malaysians can only dream about.
[3] Then there is the cost to ordinary Malaysians, who will be paying for the losses for years to come. That money was never just figures in a ledger. It was schools, hospitals and roads that were never built. It was medicines that were not on the shelves and doctors who were not there to see the sick. It was help that never reached families struggling to put food on the table. His crimes were never just against the state; they were against every one of us.
[4] In a land where the poor are sent to prison for stealing a packet of Maggi mee, it is hard to bear that such a man should be shown such extraordinary favour. The courts may make no distinction between a pauper and a prince, but those in power clearly do. Even his RM50 million fine – down from RM210 million – was paid by his party, not by him. The price of his freedom, it seems, was for others to bear.
[5] And beneath it all, a deep despair at what we have lost. There was a moment – rare in our history – when fate placed good men and women in the Attorney-General’s Chambers, in the MACC and on the bench. And for once, there was the political will to back them, a will so conspicuously absent today. They did what many thought impossible. They brought a former prime minister to account and sent a signal to all that in Malaysia no one is above the law. I remember the quiet pride so many of us felt. We dared to believe a corner had been turned.
[6] I won’t quibble about the legality of it. But let no one pretend we arrived at this wretched outcome by accident; we arrived here through the perfidy of our politicians. The prime minister, who told Parliament he had personally put Najib’s pardon application before the Pardons Board, now takes to Facebook to urge Malaysians to “speak out more loudly and send a clear message that those who commit corruption belong in prison.” Hypocrisy does not come more brazen than this. UMNO, for its part, championed a convicted man, agitated for his pardon, railed against the judiciary and turned the whole affair into a political circus. What kind of party pins its hopes of revival on a convicted criminal? And then there are all the other politicians who could have taken a firm stand on so many occasions and chose not to.
[7] Together, whether by omission or commission, they made a mockery of our justice system. They gave no thought to the people who put them in power, or to the damage they were doing to the nation. And if this is how one conviction ends, what assurance do Malaysians have about the next? Let us call it what it is: treachery. They have betrayed our country and diminished its institutions, and we are all the poorer for it.
[8] Somewhere, a nurse is finishing another double shift in an understaffed ward. A teacher is marking papers for a class of forty. A family in a flood-prone kampung is watching the sky and wondering whether the drains will hold this year. They will never live in a palace. They will go on paying, quietly, for the one that has just become a prison. When a palace becomes a prison, it is justice itself that is left behind bars.
[Dennis Ignatius | Kuala Lumpur | 11 November 2026]
No comments:
Post a Comment