Sin Chew Daily

Transparency International has just released the 2020 Corruption Perceptions Index that puts Malaysia at 57th among 180 countries and territories, a drop of six spots compared to a year earlier while the score fell from 53 to 51.

This is by no means a heartening piece of news. For so many years the Malaysian government's corruption-busting efforts have been anything but desirable. Despite loud anti-corruption slogans shouted over and again, little progress has been made.

Pakatan Harapan government immediately embarked on its fight against corruption soon after taking over the helm in 2018, gong harsh against 1MDB, Tabung Haji and other landmark corruption cases, much to the welcome of Malaysians and the international community alike.

Because of that, we saw a remarkable improvement in score by six points while making an impressive 10-spot leap in overall ranking, from 61st to 51st, in 2019.

Unfortunately, the improvement didn't last long and we fell back a year later as the initial optimism began to wane.

Even though the Perikatan Nasional government has continued to chant anti-corruption slogans after taking over the federal administration, vowing to continue implementing the National Anti-Corruption Plan (NACP), what happened during the past one year seemed to tell a different story altogether.

Some much watched corruption cases have been dropped or no one has been convicted, giving the public the impression that this country is walking down the same old path once again.

TI-M president Dr Muhammad Mohan has said the dropping of corruption charges against people like former federal territories minister Tengku Adnan Tengku Mansor, former PM Najib's stepson Riza Aziz and former Sabah CM Musa Aman has impacted our CPI score.

It is sad that the government has failed to build on the momentum of its early push in battling corruption. It is therefore imperative that the government and the MACC seriously look into the bottleneck in the anti-corruption drive and review their corruption-busting strategies. They must come to terms with the fact that corruption has become an increasingly serious issue in this country and must stop whitewashing their problems.

Several immigration officers were nabbed for counterfeiting department stamp with the shocking revelation that one of them was in possession of four luxurious sedans worth over RM2 million. This shows how far corruption has got.

We cannot deny that corruption is a deep-rooted old problem in this country that can only be solved with powerful political will, comprehensive strategy and unwavering institutional reform.

This means that the government cannot afford to stop at just shouting spirit-lifting slogans without any practical action.

There are bound to be challenges and barriers that will require tremendous political will to cross, or all our effort will be rendered futile as we fall back to square one all over again.

No one can deny that the MACC has put in a lot of effort, but judging from the existing circumstances, it is simply not sufficient. Both the government and the MACC must work a lot harder to implement institutional reform for us to make the first crucial step in weeding out corruption.