He has just about everything to lose his job as the Kuala Lumpur deputy chief, his commendable service record of 15-odd years, and his colleagues in the 10,000-strong Fire and Rescue Department.

Indeed, few of his men back him. He is almost alone in his crusade against what he calls abuse of power and corruption at the highest level in our fire department. Even his immediate boss, the KL chief, dismisses him as a crackpot.

But Mohd Ali Tambi Chik (photo) will not be deterred. And now that he has gone public with his allegations, there is really no turning back.

He has listed a litany of complaints. According to him, the big boss of the fire department, director-general Jaafar Sidek Tambi, has misused public resources in holding two grand parties for his son's wedding.

Mohd Ali said the wedding receptions were planned during office hours by top fire officials, department trucks were used to ferry chairs and tables bought specially for the event, and a power generator belonging to the department was put on stand-by outside the stadium where one of the functions was held should there be a blackout.

More troubling is his allegations that 'sponsors' for the wedding were solicited from building owners whose high-rises require fire-safety permits from the department. He also alleged that such fire certificates have been 'sold' to developers.

Days after the September wedding, Mohd Ali filed a report to the Anti-Corruption Agency but nothing much has been heard from it since. The matter was eventually put on the front burner in Parliament two weeks ago by PAS Youth chief Mahfuz Omar.

Charged for spreading 'false news'

As the whistle-blower, Mohd Ali should expect to come under intense fire. This means becoming the focus of investigation himself, instead of his allegations. This has been the case for one other whistle-blower Irene Fernandez.

Fernandez, who is head of women's organisation Tenaganita, called a press conference seven years ago to draw public attention to the appalling conditions of our illegal immigrant detention camps.

She said scores of inmates had died due to the hell-holes conditions in the camps and the failure by the police to provide timely medical attention for the sick. Detainees, too, were sexually abused and tortured.

Soon after, Fernandez was charged for spreading 'false news' and her six-year trial considered the longest in history continues to this day. Fernandez' allegations were partly based on an investigative report which I and two other colleagues in the Sun daily wrote in 1995.

During the police probe into the matter, I was grilled on one peculiar item in the Sun's report that the roof of the sweltering quarters in the Semenyih detention camp near Kajang, Selangor was corrugated zinc. I was told almost gleefully by my interrogators that it was corrugated asbestos.

That issue was revisited time and again in the three days I was questioned. The investigators, however, were apparently not interested in the paper's reported death toll of 59 detainees a figure lower than the 71 which the government later told Parliament.

Labour recruiter Golam Ahad, who first alerted the Sun journalists about the deaths in the camps, was also arrested by the police and detained for two months. He was nabbed ostensibly for problems with his immigration papers despite being a Bangladeshi married to a Malaysian and was granted permanent residency status.

On release, he became a witness for the prosecution in the Fernanadez trial and claimed not to remember details of his meetings with the journalists. It was unclear what happened to Golam during his incarceration, but top police officials have since conceded to the practice of 'turning over' witnesses in the infamous Anwar Ibrahim trial.

Don't play with fire

With such a tattered record in our treatment of whistle-blowers, it is not difficult for us to discern Mohd Ali's fate.

Already, Mohd Ali's motives are questioned by his detractors. He was accused of being bitter after being overlooked for promotion. But whatever his motives are in making the allegations, there is surely no smoke without fire.

He was also warned not to 'play with fire' and told the documents in his possession which could prove his allegations were government 'secrets'. The unspoken threat is clear: whistle-blowers could be slapped with the Official Secrets Act (OSA), which dished out a mandatory jail sentence of at least one year.

Indeed, the OSA is meant not only to muzzle inquisitive journalists, but to spook civil servants from leaking information to the press.

When the police barged into Mohd Ali's aborted press conference where evidence of his allegations were to be divulged they were unwittingly responding to a report about the presence of a 'mentally disturbed' person on the premises.

Insane, Mohd Ali is not. He is but a civil servant who believes that things must be done right. For that, he is willing to put his head on the chopping block. If only, there are more of them. And as to whether they are really crackpots, let Malaysians be the judge.