R Nadeswaran broke into the nation’s consciousness as the journalist who pursued the truth relentlessly and fought for the rights of the common man. Today, he still fights the good fight as Citizen Nades, one aspect of which has manifested itself as PKFZ: Some Untold Stories. Jacqueline Toyad and Surinder Jessy journey back in time with the hardcore reporter and
discover the things that keep him going — family and friends, respect and integrity.

Responsibility. It’s a word we’re all familiar with. We understand it and we use it often, be it in pep talks or when admonishing someone who’s forgotten the concept. Some of us embrace it, some of us choose not to accept it. But there is one man who lives by it as a philosophy. Responsibility may very well stand for the “R” in R Nadeswaran, the editor of the special reports and investigations desk at theSun newspaper.  
We all know him as Citizen Nades, the people’s journalist who tells things as they are. He’s been labelled “the scariest man in Malaysia”, “the nation’s conscience” and the “truth seeker”. We can only imagine the names reserved for him by those who’ve been reprimanded due to his myriad exposés on the misuse of public funds and corruption.

Recently, however, Nades, as he is fondly called, found himself in the news with the launch of PKFZ: Some Untold Stories — a book that brings to light more behind-the-scene facts about the Port Klang Free Zone (PKFZ) scandal. This is the veteran journalist’s first tome and it goes into detail about PKFZ — a 1999 joint venture between the Port Klang Authority (PKA) and the promoters of Jebel Ali Free Trade Zone.

In 2004, Nades broke the story of how the cost of this project, which had been budgeted at under RM2 billion, had somehow ballooned to RM4.6 billion. A paltry sum compared to what the figure is today — RM12 billion — which was brought to light by an audit report by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) earlier this year. The report confirmed many of the irregularities and mismanagement that Nades and Terence Fernandez — his partner-in-crime and deputy editor of special reports and investigations at theSun — had been highlighting over the years since Nades’ first article on PKFZ, including weaknesses in governance and conflicts of interest.

“I feel guilty, very guilty,” says Nades, 58. “I broke the story in 2004. I had the auditor-general’s report with me which warned about impending financial disaster. I broke the story and left it as it was lah. Should I have pursued it further, pushed it all the way? Because at that point, with government intervention, the cost wouldn’t have ballooned to this high. The thing is this — the MPs had the auditor-general’s general report already and they didn’t even raise it in Parliament. The first police report was made in December 2004. If they had acted with the same vigour as now, we could’ve saved another RM10 billion. So, that’s my sad ending to this whole thing. But I don’t know, as a journalist, how much can you do? You write about it but the powers that be don’t want to move on it…”

The book, he says, is a documentary. “It’s a book of records on why the whole project failed. And for most of the book, I reproduced the documents I acquired during the investigation, all of which show why the PKFZ would fail. There are also letters to ministers, unanswered. Letters on financial irregularities which nobody bothered about. Letters talking about interference and everything else,” he reveals.

Nades says he takes responsibility for not having pushed the story back in 2004. With this book, he may find his redemption. Published with cash from his own pocket, pulling favours from long-time connections for everything from editing and cover design to promotional material (the man who printed the book had also printed his wedding cards), this no-holds-barred tome “reflects the conscience of some of the people entrusted with the money; it shows the lack of checks and balances; it exposes the lack of good governance, and above all, traces the events which have led to the biggest financial scandal in the country”, as Nades describes in his author’s notes.

He writes the book as R Nadeswaran, taking full responsibility for the entire contents of the book.

“theSun gave me its blessings. If I write it as Citizen Nades of theSun, if there are any repercussions, then it would affect my colleagues, my bosses and the company. There’s always this fear factor. Writing in the paper is different from writing a book. A book is no holds barred, you just go. I don’t worry about implicating the newspaper, the management and all that. That’s why I decided to go by myself,” he says.  

• • •

Nades isn’t very tall but still his presence intimidates. Perhaps, it is his penetrative gaze, his cocksure manner, his lofty gait or the boom in his voice when he’s talking about something passionately.

With The Edge having been at one time under the same management as theSun, we’ve had many encounters with Nades. We know that beyond that rough and tough exterior of his beats a kind and generous heart; a fatherly figure who nurtures rising talents, a fiercely loyal friend and a gentlemen who ensures the safety of women at all times. Oh, he’s no saint. He does have his vices — Benson & Hedges cigarettes for one — but there is no mistaking the passion and commitment he invests in his vocation as the eyes and ears of the people. We know enough to realise that there is no real reason to fear Nades unless you’re a misguided politician or standing on the opposite side of truth.  

We meet him at Royal Selangor Club Kiara Sport Annexe, a branch of the legendary Royal Selangor Club (RSC) next to Dataran Merdeka. It’s common knowledge that the club is almost a second home to this winner of four Sopa (Society of Publishers in Asia) awards and three Malaysian Press Institute awards. He had joined the club 15 years ago in the name of cricket, his favourite sport, and although he doesn’t play anymore, his love for beer and good conversation (and the club’s subscription to the sports channels) often finds him holding court at the bar in RSC.

As we chat, his phone is either beeping or buzzing. “That’s the problem with being Citizen Nades; he knows half of KL and the other half knows him,” he quips.

Nades explains that he’s waiting for a call from his printer. It’s two days before the launch and the books are only being bound today. He’s hoping to pick them up by evening and have the first orders of the book personally signed and handed out to the buyers.

We decide to distract him from his anxiety by talking about his start in journalism.

“Full-time or part time?” he asks.

Apparently, while waiting for his Senior Cambridge results, he took a job as a sports stringer.

“I was always a sports fan, one of those crazy fellows who would have his ear close to the radio at one to two o’clock in the afternoon listening to BBC and ABC to get the latest scores. I took an interest in it and started reading the sports pages. I got really involved in it,” he recalls. “The turning point was this — I can’t remember what game it was — I was already stringing part time when I saw the great Norman Siebel, he was one of the pioneer sports reporters in this country. There was a game at Selangor Club, and a visiting team was playing. And I saw Norman Siebel with a cricket scorebook in one hand, the telephone to his ear, a glass of whiskey in another hand and he was dictating the match report to the office.

“I thought to myself, ‘This is an easy job. I can handle that’.”

In some ways, it would seem as if fate never allowed Nades to fulfil his dream of becoming a sports writer. In 1976, when he was a sports stringer for New Straits Times, he found himself in the thick of a story, literally.

“I had just covered a football match and had come back to the office to file the story when (then editor) the late Ratan Singh was screaming, ‘Hey, there’s a plane crash, I need help’. So I went along with a cameraman to the site. The plane was burning, so I had to help lah, carry people. We were all busy. The deputy CPO told me to take a baby girl to the hospital. She was bare bodied so I took off my shirt to wrap around her. When we returned to the office, the editor asked, ‘Why so late?’ I told him what happened. He asked if there was a picture of me carrying the baby and I said yes. He then said, ‘I want 10 paragraphs now’. This was 3am.”

The story made front page of the NST and with that Nades received a commendation letter, a RM100 reward and a full-time job with the newspaper.   

He joined The Malay Mail as a full-time sports writer but remained at the sports desk for only six months. “Because of my contacts, I used to get some stories, so one day Ratan Singh said: ‘Why are you sitting there at the sports desk? You should be at the news desk.’ And there was I at the news desk,” recalls Nades, who remained at the news desk at The Malay Mail for 17 years.

“I always say that The Malay Mail was the cradle for good journalists. You had good editors who gave you the basics, the training, people like Philip Mathews, Chua Huck Cheng, Ratan Singh… they were all great newsmen.”

But even with the number of scoops he landed over the years, the stories that mean the most to him are the ones where he’s seen results.

“The best story I did which had an impact was this school in Port Klang. They had an old wooden building and a new block but they couldn’t use the new block. The LLN (Lembaga Letrik Negara), as it was known in those days, refused to connect the power supply from the old building to the new building because of red tape. So I went there and I wrote the story. For some reason or other, K C Boey, my editor then, decided to use it as page one lead. The story was published on Friday and on Saturday, the guys were there connecting the electricity. That, I felt, was a great achievement of mine,” Nades says proudly.

“Some time in 1980, a group of security guards turned up at the office, claiming they were retrenched. I said, ‘Look, I’m sorry, but you should go to the labour department.’ And one guy turns around and takes out a slip and says, ‘Sir, we went to the labour department and they gave your name and asked us to come and see you.’ These are small things but it helps to keep you going. They recognise that you are able to do something.”

These days, Citizen Nades cannot afford to come to the rescue anymore. “I just can’t cope with it. I deliberately don’t put my handphone number on my business card anymore. I mean, I used to get phone calls at 2am, people saying my house no electricity and the Tenaga fellows never gave us warning and all sorts of things. So I’ve taken my number off because of this. The moment you start doing this… sometimes it looks very simple, like getting a drain unblocked or fixing potholes. But the time you spend on this… and they expect you to do it. So now it’s very simple. I don’t handle this. My plate is full, I’ve got bigger issues to look at. Try somebody else,” says Nades matter-of-factly.

Readers have come to see Nades as a miracle worker. They send him emails about their problems, sometimes up to 200 to 300 a week. Some turn up at the office unannounced, seeking help.
Do take note: He’s Citizen Nades, word warrior. Not Superman.

• • •

Nades has had his moments of vulnerability. One of them arrived in 1995, when he was 44. He had left The Malay Mail to help set up The Leader, a free newspaper, together with Frankie DeCruz (also from The Malay Mail) in 1993.

“Come Jan 1, 1995, I got up on New Year’s Day and told my wife, ‘If I lose this job, I wouldn’t know what else to do. I’m only Senior Cambridge Grade 2.’ She asked me what I wanted to do, and I said, ‘I want to go and study’,” he says.

He found a programme which accepted mature students and with his Senior Cambridge Grade 2 certificate and a stack of news clippings, he was accepted to a diploma in law programme.

“I took night classes. I was top student and got my first year diploma in law — can put on my card and action a bit lah. The school gave me a scholarship for the second year and again I was top student. So, they asked me to go to the UK, but I told them I had no money. So, because I was a top student, they offered me a £1,000 rebate on tuition fees, which was £5,000 in 1996. The pound sterling then was RM3.96. I packed up and left the wife (Sharmini) and two children, and went off. I graduated with a law degree and was selected to do the bar vocational course. So, this was when the problem started. It was September 1997 when I arrived and the pound had gone up to RM6.50. In November 1997, the pound had gone up to RM7.80, and there I was, waiting for money to be sent by Sharmini. I called her and said, ‘Don’t send any more money’, and I found work as a night porter in London. I did my bar school, self-supporting, by being a night porter.”

Nades worked for Holiday Villa in London — £4 an hour, cash in hand. He worked the graveyard shift, from 11pm to 7am. He would go into the hotel at about 10pm, have supper and proceed to look after the guests.

“By 1am, the hotel is quiet, so you can close the doors and sit down with your books. In the morning, I’d have a shower, get my free breakfast, then go off to college. After that, go back and sleep. That was the routine. I did that for nine months. That was a turning point in my life. There was an occasion when I cried, thinking to myself that I should have taken the money people were offering me at that time. I remember [retired Court of Appeal judge] Datuk V C George, visiting at someone’s house in London. My friend was telling him how I was coping as a night porter and a law student in bar school. I was meeting him then for the second time, when he said, ‘I can’t give you much, but can I give you some money?’ I told him, ‘Sir, I don’t need any money. I can manage.’ V C George still remembers that.” Incidentally, it was Datuk V C George who officiated at the launch of PKFZ: Some Untold Stories.

“That period forced me to look at survival,” muses Nades. “I used to go to the supermarket at 8pm, when they change the labels of the expiry dates. So I used to pick up 10 eggs for 10p. Pick up my beers for 30p a can. Pick up pork knuckles for 80p, which will last you a week. And my bills in London at that time — I could survive on £15 a week for my food. Of course, I kept aside £10 for my beer lah.”

When he came back, he worked as a legal consultant with Universal Music.  

“I am very proud to say that I introduced some changes to the music industry. I don’t know whether they still follow those. In those days, artistes used to get 8% to 12% royalty off the wholesale prices of their cassettes. The price was RM12.90 a cassette. Can you imagine a group getting RM1 per cassette and sharing it among five people? I thought, production costs are constant, the studio, designer and artiste prices are fixed, so whatever you sell, the production cost has been included. At that time, The Alleycats had already done 33 albums for Universal, so I said to Raymond Hon, my boss at Universal, why don’t we put royalties to a sliding scale? So we started a sliding scale — sales below 20,000 units, the artiste gets X amount. As the figures increased, the royalties increased. I don’t know whether that practice is still being followed, but I’m proud that as a lawyer I did that. In those days, when Loga was alive, whenever I went to watch The Alleycats sing, Loga and David, without fail, would send me a drink, saying thank you, you did this for us,” says Nades.

As much as he loved working in the music industry, Nades could not resist the call of the pen for long and lasted a mere four months at Universal. He was soon called to Brunei to start a newspaper. This would also mark the beginning of his partnership with Terence Fernandez.

“I met Terence on June 26, 1999. And we flew to Brunei in July. When the owner of this new paper faced financial problems, we decided to come back. H’ng Hung Yong was editor (in-chief) of theSun at the time, and he called and asked if we’d like to join them. That was my foray back into journalism. On Nov 15, I celebrate 10 years with theSun,” says Nades. “Then came Ho Kay Tat in 2005 [then editor-in-chief of theSun] who told me to get the investigative desk going. ‘How many people do you want’, he asked me. I said, ‘one, for a start’. ‘Whom do you want?’ he asked. I said, ‘Terence’. And the rest, as they say, is history.”

Indeed. Many of the important news stories in the past years have been scooped by the R Nadeswaran-Terence Fernandez dynamic duo. These stories include the “low-cost palace” of the late Port Klang assemblyman Datuk Zakaria Deros, the billboard licensing scandal involving Petaling Jaya’s local authorities, the proposal for a High Performance Training Centre in London for Malaysian athletes, public land grabs in Bandar Utama and Ampang Jaya and the disappearance of funds of the association of wives of state assemblymen and members of parliament in Selangor.

This partnership has evolved into something more these days, with Terence having become a part of Nades’ family. Sometimes, when Nades’ wife Sharmini (a former journalist) needs him to see the doctor, she rings Terence for help.

“That’s the kind of relationship we have; we work so close together. He knows the stories I’m working on, I know the stories he’s working on. It’s come to a point where people say that if our bylines are taken away, our writing sounds the same,” muses Nades.

“It’s good that I am able to pass on to somebody. I think his writing is better than mine because he’s younger and everything else. He is part of my life now. On the night of my daughter’s accident five years ago, I called three friends: Joe DeSilva, Raymond Hon and Terence. These are my three close friends.”

• • •

Nades says his brightest moment in journalism so far was when he broke the story on the High Performance Training Centre for Malaysian athletes in Brickendonbury — a RM490 million scam of taxpayers’ money. Says Nades, “I went [to the UK] and filed a couple of stories from there. I then came back and wrote the story, and Ho Kay Tat published it. Then later, one of the directors of theSun called up Kay Tat and said that I never went there. That’s when Kay Tat stood up and said ‘Nades, have you got pictures of yourself there?’ Then we ran another full feature with a photograph of me there. This is where the role of the editor comes in. These are bright moments of journalism, to have your editor standing by you and giving you support.”

Of course, his darkest moment is when he is left high and dry with an untold story.

“I’ve always enjoyed writing. And at NST, even when I was sent to the subs desk, I just couldn’t keep quiet. In the morning, I would get stories and write them. For me, even at the ‘worst moments’ I enjoyed myself. At that time, you’re not mature enough to realise the forces that are at work behind the scenes, such as the editor’s relationship with certain businessmen, politicians… you can’t read their political agenda. So, you’re actually walking along a blind alley and second guessing who your editor’s friends are, which way he leans politically, that kind of thing. Those were the dark times in journalism for me,” he shares.

“Unlike my relationship with Kay Tat, that was different. He always said, ‘I am the weatherman. I know when it will rain and when it will shine. When I ask you to lay off, that means it’s bad weather ahead.’ I had no problems. I didn’t have to worry about putting in so much of hard work and not seeing the story published. With some of the other editors I worked with, I had such problems. Never with Kay Tat,” he shares.

“One that comes to mind is, in the late 1980s, when I went to Manchester where they were trying to export the Proton Saga into the UK. Proton was going for location tests, to see if the cars were made to UK standards. They were very nice, even gave me a suite at the hotel. I was the only journalist there. The next day, while they were taking the car for a test, they said, ‘Here’s a car and a driver, go do whatever you want’. So I toured old Trafford, not for football but cricket. When I came back, there was not a soul in sight at the hotel. Next morning at breakfast, I was told, ‘You cannot write about this’. The car had failed the test — 73 defects were discovered. I made a reverse charge call to the office and when the editor came on the line, I said this is the story. He said, ‘No need to write anything, you just take a holiday because Munir Majid has just been removed as editor. There is uncertainty at the NST’.”

So, what drives this seeker of truth? It seems like dishonesty abounds in this country.

“I don’t mind when someone lies; then I can dispute with documents. But sometimes they don’t say anything. Terence and I are currently working on another story — a forest reserve is being degazetted in Damansara, supposedly for a Muslim cemetery. They degazetted about 50ha — 22ha was for the cemetery. When I asked what was going to happen to the remaining 28ha, the reply was, ‘Oh, that’s for future development’. Now I’ve got documents in my hand indicating that they’ve transferred the land to MPPJ and forcing it to enter into a joint-venture agreement with one of the cronies. So now, the story is going to come out. As usual, I ask Terence, ‘What do you think will be the outcome?’ Nothing,” he says.

“The point to note is this — I’m expecting results. That is the primary mission — I want to see some results. The side effects are that more people are becoming aware of the nonsense that is taking place. This means that the people can now question their MP or civil servant, how did you allow this to happen? Why are you not doing anything? So as long as you create awareness… people are beginning to stand up and question decisions, expenditure and everything else. If they have no knowledge of such incidences of misuse of funds, they will not be able to stand up and ask.”

In his notes for Some Untold Stories, Nades has written: “Over the years, most Malaysians have gotten the impression that acts of negligence and callousness, spiced up in some cases with corruption, are the result of a lack of conscience; they bitch about it for a few days and then forget about them. When another act or omission makes the front pages, the same routine continues.”

There is frustration in these lines as Nades feels that we as citizens should take action rather than wait around for someone to save us.

“The sad thing in this country is the practice of ‘never mind lah’,” he says. “I’ll give you an example. Nearby my house, somebody had put up billboards blocking the playground. I wrote to the authorities and they didn’t do anything, so I called for a meeting of the residents, and I said, ‘we each give RM100 and we go get a court order’. They were willing to give the RM100 but unwilling to put their name to the paper. I returned their money and tore up the letter. I said, ‘You guys have no balls to do this… don’t come and waste my time’.”

It seems that his “shape up or shut up” attitude is not reserved for politicians but also the average citizen. We need to take responsibility for ourselves. Nades puts the truth out there; what we do with it is our prerogative. He is all for accountability and demands it of everyone, including those he tries to help. His underlying mission is to empower all citizens of this nation with information, the truth, so that we can have control of our environment. So that we can stand up and question our leaders, remind them of their main duty, which is to serve the people who elected them.

By nature, Nades has always been one to take matters into his own hands. As a young boy, the modest neighbourhood he grew up in Klang had no public telephone. Come emergencies, one had to run to the house of someone with a telephone with a 10 cent coin and ask to borrow a phone. So, at all of 14 years, Nades wrote a petition and went around the neighbourhood to get everyone’s signature before sending it off to Jabatan Telekom. Two months later, they showed up at his house, asking young Nades where he would like the public telephone booth.

“After joining The Malay Mail, when I’d go back to Klang, I was still like that. My late mother would tell me, ‘You’re helping everybody else — what about our neighbours? In our housing area, the drain is flooding, our rubbish is not collected’… so I became the petition writer. When my neighbours saw my car at the house, that’s when they’d come over to tell me their problems,” he recalls.

In Nades’ eyes, while he is willing to help the average man, he feels that no one should surrender to being a victim. After all, he himself has been a victim of fate and circumstances, but he never gave in.

We refer to the sudden death of his older daughter Sumitra, 19, in a road accident five years ago. It was undoubtedly a difficult period for Nades. In the months following her death, many noticed that his zest for life had dimmed but they also saw that he did not surrender to his grief.

“It’s simple — I had to hold my family together. If I broke, everyone around me would have collapsed,” he reveals.

He cremated his daughter on a Sunday. That following Tuesday was her memorial ceremony.

“My then editor Kay Tat came and told me to take off as long as I wanted. I told him I had been in the office that morning. ‘Doing what?’ he asked me. I said, I sent in my column this morning. ‘What did you write about?’ he asked. I said, go and read lah.”

Nades said that the strength had much to do with his group of very close friends who rallied around him, calling him every day to make sure he kept busy.

“I didn’t take compassionate leave, nothing. I was back at the office; I just got back into things. I was able to hold my family together. My younger daughter (Vichitra) was angry with me. The accident happened around midnight and she had been asleep and I didn’t wake her up. I said, let her sleep. She complained to Terence, ‘They always keep me out of the loop’. I’ve got to live with this. Life… it goes on,” he shares. The mood around us is a little sombre now as we watch this man recall the moment he learnt his firstborn had passed on. Just as he is our nation’s conscience, Sumitra had been his. It was she who used to call and remind him that it was late and time to come home.

He recalls something that happened a day before our interview. Terence was in the midst of putting together a slideshow in memory of Sumitra for the launch of Some Untold Stories, held on the fifth anniversary of her death (Oct 16). While searching through some of her things for old photos for the slideshow, Nades came across a scrapbook Sumitra had done for her Form 3 project back in 2000.

Nades shares, “The cover said ‘Tokoh Saya’ and inside was all about me, with newspaper cuttings, including one of me receiving the Journalist of the Year award in 1982. I didn’t realise she’d done that. So I feel that her spirit lives on in me and I carry on… if I had broken down at that time…” he tells us, knocking his knuckles agitatedly on the table as tears well up in his eyes. “I don’t think I would have ever recovered.”

There is a pause as Nades lights up another cigarette. He may be the “scariest man in Malaysia”, but he is just as vulnerable as the next man.

• • •

Nades confesses, “I was on the verge of giving up many, many years ago. But I thought, if I give up, what about the younger journalists who want to do what I’m doing? What message am I sending them? I think that’s what keeps me going. If I stop all this, who’s going to do it?”

For those not in the know, Nades’ talent for nurturing journalists has not been reserved for Terence. In fact, when he was senior journalist at The Malay Mail, he would come in and talk to rookie journalists in NST’s pre-editorial training scheme. They may recall him as the pompous sessionist who opened his talk with “I am the reporter with the most amount of suits at NST. But they can’t touch me because I always make sure I have my facts right”. (It wasn’t so much a boast as a lesson in the rudiments of reporting — truth prevails but evidence and proof is your saviour.) There are also the young interns he had taken under his wing at theSun who have now emerged as journalists, lawyers, broadcast journalists and so on, all of whom were inspired by his passion and drive for the greater good.

We ask if he would encourage someone’s child to be journalist.

Nades smiles awkwardly, “I do not know how to encourage. Society has changed so much. I always say, ‘Whatever you undertake, you must do it with passion. If you don’t have the passion, forget it.’ Young ones come in with misconceptions — I want to be a journalist so I can get into the Beyonce concert… this kind of thing comes into their mind. If they want to be like me, they should be covering issues like bad drainage and sinking potholes. Who wants to do that? What do they teach at journalism school? There’s such a thing as rising through the ranks — people like me, never went to college, never went to journalism school. P C Shivadas was the first graduate to be employed as a journalist. The rest of us learnt on the job,” he says.

“Six months ago, I was invited to lecture at one of the colleges and I said, (and I repeat it today), ‘the trouble is, academicians are teaching journalism’. Guys who’ve never seen or stepped into a newsroom, how are they going to teach journalism when they themselves have not been journalists? So I got a nasty note from one of the lecturers, ‘How can you say this? I’ve got a master’s from some university...’ It’s totally different what you learn from the textbooks and what you learn in a newsroom. I replied, ‘I stand by what I said. You feel bad because I said it in front of 150 students’.”

When Nades isn’t uncovering misdeeds, he plays golf, although this has been known to be one game through which he gets his tip-offs sometimes. He also loves to cook and claims to make the best char siew. We do hope that this is an invitation to tasting in the near future.

He also spends time reading newspapers online. “I’m not so much into books and everything else,” he confesses. “I’m on most of the English language newspapers. I spend a lot of time reading them; I do get story ideas from there, Indian magazines especially. Some of them are superb, far better than Time or Newsweek.”  

A newsman through and through. Will there come a time when Citizen Nades decides to retire?

He laughs, as if it were an incredulous notion. “I don’t know. I just ask myself, what will I do if I stop? I can’t be writing on birds and bees or food and fashion… I do not know. I think as long as I’m fit, I am employable and I hate being confined to an office. Eighty per cent of my tip-offs come from watering holes, meeting people. I’ve been offered a teaching position to teach journalists, but that’s a bit boring for me. As I said, you may not know tomorrow, if you’ll be dead or alive, so you just carry on lah. I’ve stayed out of trouble. I’m not an anti-national element or a communist or have political ambitions whatsoever. Although I would like to stand for local council elections. And if I stand, it would be as an independent, no affiliations. I don’t want to get involved in state politics. At local level, I think we should give back to society. You’ve made a lot of noise, talk so much, now do it yourself, kind of thing. For me, I don’t think I’m ever going to give up. I’m still employable. My brains are still sharp, I’ve got a law degree. Whether I want to do that kind of job, I prefer writing anytime.”

We’ve taken up enough of Nades’ time. His printer has called and the books will be ready by four o’clock. We then decide to end the interview with a quick word association exercise with the legendary scribe.

Truth.
“Seek the truth.”
Respect.
“Respect everybody.”
Integrity.
“Everybody must have integrity.”
Journalist.
“Do your job as a profession and not as a source of income.”
Family and friends.
“Very important to you; they’re always there when you need them.”

This article appeared in Options, the lifestyle pullout of The Edge Malaysia, Issue 778, Oct 26-Nov 1, 2009.