What is transparency?

In Malaysia, transparency is a BIG word. How big exactly? Big enough to win you 92% of the parliament and also nearly the whole rakyat's confidence. So what does it really mean to us Malaysian? Most importantly what does transparency means to ever blogger's favourite Prime Minister, Abdullah Badawi?

You see, back when Pak Lah first step into the "throne" of the Prime Minister, he pledge to the whole nation that he wants a clean, corrupt-free and transparent country. Everyone believed him. Even me, the opposition supporter is touched by his shit (Datuk Fu said we must practice self-censorship you know ^_^) speech. Everyone says he will bring Malaysia to new heights and shit like that. By everyone I mean the mainstream press since they always thought they know what we think.

The PM did all he could (since the Elections are coming). Releasing the Air Pollution Index to the public to show that he is no Mahathir. Next he catch a few Datuks and charge them with corruption (with their cases never to be heard of again in the papers). When the elections came he won a whooping 92%. After that all hell breaks loose. Everything that the PM once pledge seems to go down the toilet bowl called Malaysian politics. It seems the fight for corruption seem to stopped suddenly and transparency took a back seat.

Two years after the elections, scandals seem to sprout out one after another. Scandals like squat-gate, APs, Proton, MAS, Half-ass Bridge and Mahathir's several accusations on Pak Lah are all half-assly censored off. Most of them seems to follow a format like these:

Step 1: Headline the news.

Step 2: Have every single editors in the newspaper having their say on the issues.

Step 3: When the issues/scandals seems to reach it's peak and Malaysia finally had press freedom and the government is pissed.....

Step 4: With a full potong-stim way of doing things, it seems there are no such issues at all after that. There are no more reports on the issues or what so ever and finally...

Step 5: The very same reporters and editors that once condemned the issues and scandals to hell, start to defend the government.

So is that transparency in Malaysia? When something new comes up the press can report everything they want and when everything seems to reach it's climax the next thing you know it, it became silent again. Even the most transparent place in Malaysia (which is the Internet) is not spared by the higher ups. Bloggers now are threatened so that we can't have our say on the issues because to them that is misreporting. We can't have our opinions too because that is defamatory. We can't speculate too because that is called rumours. So can anyone tell me what is Pak Lah's definition of transparency?