KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia’s prime minister likes to talk about the need to tackle corruption.

But an international corruption monitor and Malaysia’s opposition say events closer to home demand that Abdullah Ahmad Badawi match his words with more decisive action.

“There is deep worry that corruption is so endemic that without zero tolerance and action from the top, we will end up with a great credibility gap,” said Anwar Fazal, a member of corruption monitor Transparency International Malaysia.

Malaysia, which marked its 49th year of independence on Thursday and strives to become a developed nation within 15 years, has begun to reveal growing gaps between the official rhetoric on corruption and action taken on the ground.

Abdullah, dubbed ‘Mr Clean’ for his anti-graft message, used his position on Monday as chairman of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) to point out the critical need to address corruption in the mainly developing Islamic world.

But this week, Nazri Aziz, a member of his own cabinet, publicly reprimanded a customs official after the official suggested that a ruling-party lawmaker was threatening him.

The lawmaker is involved in a business that was fined by customs this year for smuggling Indonesian logs into Malaysia. He admits to having asked customs to ‘close one eye’ to the affair and to sending a text message to the customs official.

The text message said customs continued to ‘harass’ the lawmaker’s firms and that he would continue to raise questions about the customs department in parliament. The lawmaker, Mohamad Said Yusof, told Reuters on Friday the message was not meant as a threat.

Parliament’s wrath over the text message was directed at the whistle-blowing official, not Said. Abdullah then ordered the lawmaker and customs to stop their slinging match.

“With the ‘gag order’ from the prime minister, are all these allegations of malpractices, abuses of power, misuse of public funds, corruption and breach of parliamentary privilege instantly swept under the carpet?” asked opposition leader Lim Kit Siang.

“It will be a major blow to the commitment of the Abdullah administration to national integrity when there is no sense of right and wrong,” he added.

—Reuters