BY: DESMOND JUDE

Malaysians are beginning to get anxious and worried over the significant number of law enforcement agencies personnel and civil servants whom they consider to be grossly over-empowered with power and authority.

Whether it is PDRM officers or MACC officials or Immigration, as long as they have job duties and functions in policing the rakyat most of these public officials are high-handed, abusive and arrogant as they go about their tasks.

The reason for a growing spate of abuses, wrongdoings and atrocities by a law enforcement agency worker or a civil servant is because there is the absence of independent regulatory bodies and the absence of checks and balances.

This therefore translates into these civil servants being a law unto themselves. It is critically important to draw the lines on the bestowing of power and authority and to what extent civil servants can exercise these powers.

By endorsing government workers who are not suitable to be empowered, it results in much directionless governance of the country especially where officers of the law hold sweeping powers of authority.

There is now the arduous task of the Madani government to ensure that public servants and officials do not overstep the boundaries or scope of their powers and authority, but confine themselves within limits which must be imposed on them to cut them down to size.

-THE MALAYSIA VOICE

** The views expressed on this opinion is of the writer and not the publisher