Setelah diperkenalkan dua tahun lalu, Sistem Penguatkuasaan Automatik (AES) bernilai RM700 juta untuk merakam pemandu laju kini menjadi gajah putih, tidak dapat memenuhi tujuan mencegah pelanggaran had kelajuan kerana berhadapan dengan isu undang-undang yang masih tertangguh.
Saman masih dikeluarkan menerusi sistem ini – hampir 1.5 juta mengikut jumlah terkini – tetapi hanya sedikit yang membayar, kerana tindakan Peguam Negara membekukan penguatkuasaan terhadap pesalah yang disenarai hitam kerana tidak membayar denda dalam tempoh ditetapkan.
Jabatan Pengangkutan Jalan (JPJ) mendedahkan hanya kira-kira 200,000 saman daripada jumlah itu diselesaikan, tetapi tanpa kuasa untuk menyenaraihitamkan mereka yang tidak membayar, AES menjadi alat tidak berkesan untuk mencegah mereka yang memandu melebihi had laju.
Ketua Pengarah JPJ Datuk Seri Ismail Ahmad berkata kepada The Malaysian Insider, AES masih relevan, tetapi ia jadi sia-sia selagi pembekuan masih diteruskan.
"AES terus beroperasi dan kami terus memberi saman, tetapi belum ada keputusan daripada Peguam Negara sama ada kita boleh menyenaraihitamkan mereka yang tidak membayar dalam tempoh masa tertentu.
"Selagi tidak ada keputusan mengenai perkara itu, kita tidak boleh menyenarai hitam sesiapa. Justeru, ini menyebabkan AES tidak berkesan," katanya.
RM700 juta macam duit bapa depa... Baca sini dan sini...
Anwar tetap pulang hadapi keputusan Liwat II
Anwar Ibrahim: 'I'll risk prison to take on the government'...
He has been in prison before, and has no wish to return. But when Anwar Ibrahim, long-serving figurehead of Malaysia's opposition, steps back on a plane he knows that may be exactly where he is headed.
"Quite a few of my friends have tried to persuade me to stay away," he told The Telegraph on Friday. He would not be the first politician in flight from his government to seek refuge in London.
"It is very difficult, particularly for my family. But when I started this case for reform in Malaysia I knew it was not going to be easy.
"We are facing not just a political party but a whole system that is corrupt and repressive. But if people like me can't stand up against these atrocities what can we expect from young people?"
Mr Ibrahim has been at the heart of one of the longest-running and most personal legal battles in world politics.
Once upon a time, he was an internationally respected finance minister and deputy to Malaysia's former prime minister and dominant political figure, Mahathir Mohamad. He led economic reforms held up as an example by the West.
But when the two men fell out, and Mr Ibrahim went into opposition, the government turned against him, accusing the married father of five of everything from corruption to homosexuality, illegal in this predominantly Muslim country.
His first conviction on that count was overturned in 2004, after being first arrested in 1998, but rearrests and convictions along with successful appeals continued, until a court reinstated a five-year jail term in March. His final appeal is in ten days' time.
The extraordinary thing is that in the meantime he has been able to carry on with his career, leading an opposition coalition to within an ace of victory in elections last year, winning a majority of votes but a minority of seats in parliament.
The strength of the opposition's performance – the nearest it has ever come to overthrowing the mighty ruling party, the National Front – showed Mr Ibrahim's appeal to the growing urban middle classes in one of the world's most praised emerging economies.
In a way, that has also worked against him. While other opposition leaders detained by their governments, such as Aung San Suu Kyi in neighbouring Burma, have become icons in the West, Malaysia, which allows an active opposition and is stable and relatively prosperous, is seen more as model than pariah.
This flies in the face of the government's autocratic ways, he says.
Amnesty International points to an increasing use of anti-sedition laws the government has itself pledged to repeal to crack down on dissent, while there has been an upswing in rhetoric apparently aimed at appealing to a core audience of conservative Malays at the expense of the country's Chinese and Indian minorities.
"They are resorting to racist slurs and religious bigotry," he said.
"But the international community, what with the catastrophes in other parts of the Muslim world, is not prepared to take a position on Malaysia, which is relatively peaceful."
This was a mistake, he said, as Malaysia should be a beacon for Muslim states that want to become more democratic, like Tunisia or Turkey.
Whether the apparent invincibility of the National Front can last, a decade after Mr Mohamad's retirement, is another matter.
The fragility of its standards of governance was cast into a sharp light earlier this year with the two disasters with which the national Malaysian Airlines has become synonymous – the disappearance of MH370 somewhere in the Indian Ocean, and the shooting down of MH17 over Ukraine.
While the country was seen as an innocent victim in the latter case, over MH370 the slowness and opacity of the government's response caused both international bafflement and outrage. It took the authorities a week to reveal that the plane had turned off its predicted course and headed back over the country before traversing large swathes of the Indian Ocean – apparently undetected by civilian or military radar.
Mr Ibrahim said it was still refusing to make public key items like the radar records of the night in question, or the cargo manifest.
"Until today, I have still not got answers," he said. "The government tried to cover up but it was the focus of so much media attention for weeks, and this threw light on the system as it is in Malaysia."
With the plane still not found, and a myriad conspiracy theories circulating as to what happened to it, the case is a running sore for the authorities. Not lost on them has been the fact that the pilot, Capt Zaharie Ahmad Shah, was a prominent supporter of Mr Ibrahim and had met him.
He is still being singled out in some quarters as the most likely culprit. He was seemingly the only man with the power to disable the plane's response systems and devise a course that avoided notice – but, Mr Ibrahim points out, that is merely one aspect of the mystery.
"To say that he would have hijacked the plane because he was a supporter of mine is ludicrous," he said. Of course, like everyone else, he is at a loss to give a good explanation, but he also questions the silence from other countries that has engulfed the operation, despite the lack of information coming from Malaysia.
"I'm not a believer in conspiracy theories, but it's certainly unusual for so many countries not to take a strong stand, and to assume that a plane could disappear without any plausible explanation."
In a country at a crossroads, with clear political, ethnic and religious dividing lines threatening its future, the crises facing its airline and its best-known political figure both seem like distractions.
At least when he flies home on Saturday, to face an uncertain fate, the two will not coincide. Mr Ibrahim will be flying Thai International, not Malaysian – for cost reasons only, he insists. - the telegraph
'With friends like these, who needs enemies?'
cheers.
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