“Is this Malaysian hospitality?” Puad Zarkashi asked in a Facebook post in mid-July 2023, after watching tourists squeeze onto shuttle buses at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. A month earlier, he said, the little train that normally carries passengers from the main building to the international departures terminal had stopped running. It was still dead.
Puad sits on the Umno Supreme Council and is the Rengit state assemblyman and Speaker of the Johor state assembly. He told followers he flew out to Jeddah on 17 June and found the aerotrain already stuck. When he came back a month later, nothing had changed. In his words, the repair work was moving slower than a snail.
His picture of the replacement service was blunt. Passengers and tourists, some holding hand luggage, were “crammed” into the buses, he wrote, and he pitied the senior citizens in the crush. He told readers the airport is the country’s main gateway for foreign visitors, and that tourists “packed like sardines” do the country’s image no favours. Malaysia Airports Holdings Berhad, which runs the airport, took most of his criticism over the buses. The Rakyat Post carried his sharper line: “More like Malaysia’s Hostility!”
Where are the ministers?
Puad also named two cabinet members. Transport Minister Anthony Loke and Tourism, Arts and Culture Minister Tiong King Sing, he said, were nowhere to be seen. “What happened to the Ministry of Transport?” he asked.
His complaint about Tiong had a sting to it. The month before, Tiong had admitted to being at the centre of a commotion with immigration officers at the same airport, when he stepped in over a Chinese woman who was said to have been refused entry. Tiong was reported as saying his visit exposed a “culture of corruption by a few officials and the chronic abuse of power”. The episode drew Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim to Terminal 1 for a surprise visit to check on immigration staff.
Puad turned that history around. “Doesn’t he want to visit KLIA for the second time?” he asked of Tiong. “The other day, he was so concerned over one woman from China.” The aerotrain failure, he argued, touched thousands of tourists every day, so why the silence? He suggested the prime minister should come back to KLIA too.
A long record of faults
Nothing about the trouble was new. The Rakyat Post noted that the aerotrain has run since the airport opened 24 years earlier and has been suspended several times because of technical faults. The latest earlier incident had come in March, when a breakdown involving 114 passengers forced people to walk 400m along the track. Malaysia Airports Holdings suspended the service after that.
A full replacement, with a new train and track system, was due by 2025. Until then, for the families dragging suitcases onto crowded buses, the wait was a daily one.
Sources
- Tourists 'packed like sardines' in KLIA shuttle buses bad for our image, says Puad (Free Malaysia Today)
- Aerotrain KLIA Still Stuck, Ministers Missing In Action – Puad (The Rakyat Post)
Sources
- Transport Ministry Warns of Action Against MAHB Over… – ExpatGo
- [UPDATED] Loke: Ministry to review each aerotrain breakdown…
