OpinionMTR scandal brings low Hong Kong’s arrogant ‘tyranny of experts’

What does it take to keep an entire board in the dark, including your biggest shareholder (who happens to be the government)? Nerves of steel or, in this case, 5,000 faulty steel bars. How is the Mass Transit Railway Corporation ever going to recover from this epic fail?

And now that heads have rolled, the government and the pro-establishment camp must take stock of the colossal damage the MTR has caused and the political costs the railway operator has offloaded to them by going from world-class rail operator to being a joke that has made fools out of the government and the public.

MTR Corp chairman Frederick Ma Si-hang has been reasonably ordered to stay on to clean up the mess and contain the damage that has already been done. This may be the same reason Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor is insisting that transport minister Frank Chan Fan stay put.

Lam is not unaware of how her own minister had flaunted the same elitist folly as Ma. Following Ma’s footsteps in responding to media scrutiny over reports of derailments of high-speed rail project with the now-infamous assertion, “If we tell you it’s OK, then it is”, Chan tried to turn the derailment crisis into a game of semantics – a blatant gaslighting effort – by refusing to use the Chinese term for derailment, stating that “derailment” is a colloquial term used to describe infidelity in a marriage.

It hasn’t even been three months since Ma said, with chest puffed, that “the public can rest assured that we have a high [degree] of transparency”. To have the chief executive swoop in to say now that Ma and the rail operator’s board of directors, including her transport minister, were “kept in the dark” has to be seriously ego-deflating.