What if, PMX was told of a crony project that has sucked out hundreds of millions of tax payers monies?
Coming hot on the heels of the release of the RCI report on Tabung Haji and the ongoing investigations into Felda which is expected to reveal again politicians and their cronies exploiting the agency of its members monies, exposing this latest revelation could backfire on him with the opposition members likely to cry foul and claim political vendetta.
So what better way to expose this app, a navigation apps awarded out indiscriminately and that does not bring any clear benefits to the ordinary rakyat?
Cite national security concerns.
Many Western nations have restricted foreign-owned technology, social media platforms, and telecommunications equipment using this exact justification, providing a ready-made rhetorical blueprint.
National security is inherently elastic.
It can encompass physical infrastructure, economic stability, data privacy, and geopolitical influence, making it difficult to completely disprove.
Look at how the directive is structured.
There is a gap between the gravity of "national security" rhetoric and the limited scope of the actual policy to support this conclusion.
If an application genuinely poses a critical threat to a country's national security, standard security protocol dictates an outright nationwide ban or blocking the app at the network level.
PMX is using structural pressure to force public scrutiny onto a project without the top leader having to initiate a direct political attack.
By restricting civil servants from using Waze and heavily promoting the homegrown alternative, TuJu, PMX effectively generated a massive, involuntary stress test.
The immediate technical failure and subsequent public backlash have thrust the app's underlying contract, origins, and developer, Prosignal Consortium Sdn Bhd, directly into the spotlight.
By putting TuJu forward as the premier national security alternative, the government ensured that millions of eyes—and the media—would immediately dissect it.
The app suffered critical navigation failures almost immediately upon the surge of users. Rather than a standard administrative roll-out, the app was instantly labeled a "national embarrassment" by high-profile figures within the political ecosystem, most notably from the Bagan MP.
Because the app failed so publicly under the new directive, it created immediate political leverage for lawmakers to demand details that are usually kept behind bureaucratic walls.
In political terms, this allows the system to demand accountability and expose potential cronyism or "waste of money" through public and parliamentary pressure, rather than PMX launching a top-down investigation that could look like a selective political witch hunt.
By framing the restriction strictly around cybersecurity and digital sovereignty via the National Cyber Security Committee, PMX maintains a position of national duty.
When the app crashed and faced intense criticism, PMX openly acknowledged the app's flaws and poor efficiency, casually noting that "TuJu is incomplete" and telling civil servants they are free to use other alternatives like Google Maps in the meantime.
This posture allows the leadership to remain insulated from the app's failure ("we just wanted a secure local option") while the public and backbenchers do the heavy lifting of uncovering who authorized and profited from a defective product.
Just like the RCI on Tabung Haji, the political mechanism remains the same.
Force the public and the political opposition to dig into the procurement details themselves, effectively uncovering potential cronyism without the top leadership having to explicitly point the finger first.
FLK (leekhean.foo@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
The User Content (as defined on Newswav Terms of Use) above including the views expressed and media (pictures, videos, citations etc) were submitted & posted by the author. Newswav is solely an aggregation platform that hosts the User Content. If you have any questions about the content, copyright or other issues of the work, please contact creator@newswav.com.
