Credit : Tengku Zafrul Aziz's X
KUALA LUMPUR, November 1, 2026 – Tengku Datuk Seri Zafrul Abdul Aziz, the Prime Minister’s senior political adviser and chairman of the Malaysian Investment Development Authority (MIDA), says his Facebook page was flooded by what he called Vietnamese “cybertroopers” after he posted a video explaining rural road spending.
In a 33-second video shared on X on Sunday night, recorded selfie-style from the back seat of a car, Zafrul opened with a question: “Is someone feeling stung?” He then said: “After I made a video explaining the rural road allocation, which has increased almost threefold, suddenly a lot of Vietnamese cybertroopers attacked my FB.”
He captioned the post “Which party has opened a branch in Vietnam?”, adding the hashtags #TZA and #MADANIBekerja, and repeated the jibe at the end of the video: “Has some party opened a new branch in Vietnam?”
The video shows a screen recording of the “Haha” reactions on his Facebook, which number 632, with nearly all of the accounts listed carrying Vietnamese names. It also briefly shows two of those profiles, which appear to have little or no content. Zafrul did not say who he believed was behind the accounts, although his question about a party opening a branch in Vietnam implied a political motive. LNA could not independently verify who operates the accounts or where they are based.
The video Zafrul referred to was his explanation of the rural road issue, in which he said rural road expenditure for the 2023 to 2027 period, including allocations for this year and next year, had risen to RM11 billion from RM3.7 billion for 2018 to 2022, an increase of almost three times. The same comparison appears on a graphic in Sunday’s clip, titled “Perbelanjaan Jalan Luar Bandar” (Rural Road Expenditure).
He has also said that Sabah and Sarawak receive about half of the country’s rural road expenditure each year, that actual rural road spending in the two states reached RM1.41 billion this year, the highest in a decade, and that RM4.6 billion has been spent there since 2023. “Sabah and Sarawak have not been sidelined. They have been prioritised,” he said, as reported by Bernama.
The debate follows the Finance Ministry’s move on September 10 directing the Ministry of Rural and Regional Development (KKDW) to suspend new Letters of Acceptance for rural road projects, after the ministry’s spending exceeded the allocations approved in annual budgets and led to delays in payments to contractors. The Finance Ministry also approved an additional RM500 million in expenditure for 2026. Zafrul has stressed that deferring new contracts does not mean existing projects have been cancelled, and that the Finance Ministry never issued any directive to cancel them.
The term “cybertrooper”, often shortened to “cytro” in Malaysian slang, is widely used in the country for people who operate organised accounts to push political messages or attack opponents online. Meta, which owns Facebook, has said it acted against 687 million fake accounts on Facebook between April and June 2025, most of them detected before users reported them.
Zafrul served as Finance Minister from March 2020 to October 2022 and as Minister of Investment, Trade and Industry from December 2022 to December 2025, before taking up his current roles.
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