Heed Musa’s advice to ‘get on with it’

 

From Terence Netto

Former deputy prime minister Musa Hitam’s rather exasperated advice to the unity government to get going was an echo of a memorable line from a compelling movie, Shawshank Redemption.

“Get busy living or get busy dying” was what a convict planning his escape from a US federal penitentiary tells his fellow inmate who has resigned himself to life in prison.

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In other words, if you do not get going you will be faced with the death that’s already in your cells.

Faced at last Friday’s Parliament Lecture Series 1.0 with one panellist’s suggestion that Parliament must be empowered first, and with another’s intimation that the economy will take three years to be reset, Musa metaphorically threw up his hands in exasperation.

He told his confreres, Rais Yatim and Rafizi Ramli, they were not going to get the time to see the things they want get done in the span allotted to them.

The reason: in Musa’s reckoning, events in Malaysian politics tend to occur at three-to-five-month intervals. These events could upset the fondest calculations.

What Musa was driving at was that after two months in power, the unity government of Anwar Ibrahim is running out of time where mere talk would suffice. It is time to implement the talk.

Musa’s admonition is itself an echo of another gloomy lamentation – that of Harold MacMillian, the British prime minister of the late 1950s to early ’60s, who when asked about the biggest challenge to statesmen, replied: “Events, my dear boy, events.”

Both Musa and MacMillian were sceptical that incumbents can enjoy the luxury of propitious timing for the things they view as required to be done at the time they think these could be done.

After a period of talking about things they want to do, governors must get going with the doing of it.

Otherwise, importunate events could intervene, events that could capsize their plans.

It is easy for incumbents to lull themselves with talk about what they intend to do.

Just the other day, Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, in remarks at the launch of a book of essays in honour of Islamic intellectual Osman Bakar, said he knew that Islamic education was not being taught the way it should.

He did not say what was wrong with the way it is being taught.

After more than a half-century’s involvement in the Islamic arena, if Anwar, upon being PM, says he knows that Islamic education is not being taught the way he thinks it properly should, and then refrains from elaborating, it just means that more talk on the topic will have to be adduced before anything can be agreed on with respect to rectification.

In short, more jaw-jawing is in store.

And that’s just on Islamic education. What about this creature called ‘madani’?

The term used to denote ‘civil society’. But ‘civil society’ is a term redolent of western connotations.

To Islamists, it is suspect.

The problem arises in that contestation among rival Islamists is being decided in favour of those who can deploy terms that are innate to the religion, devoid of western tendrils.

When the Egyptian envoy in the court of Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette was trying to make sense of the ferment that threatened the French monarchy with extirpation in the late 18th century, he reported home that the restless masses in Paris were clamouring for ‘adyl’, the Arabic word for justice.

So much more was entailed by the French Revolution than just justice. There was equality, liberty, and freedom to profess belief or unbelief.

But the Egyptian envoy could only imbibe issues in terms of the jargon he was imbued with by his religion. Anything other than that was beyond his ken.

Anwar’s problem is how to dispense with the labels – whose western provenance he understands but is unable to transliterate into Islamic terms – and get on with their substance. - FMT

Terence Netto is a senior journalist and an FMT reader.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.