Welcome to Crony Nation

The BN government's irresponsible attitude in using citizens' money to help out crony corporations smacks of bad governance

COMMENT

Want to go into debt by taking out a bank loan? Deal with a crony bank. Want to subscribe to a telecommunications service? Deal with a crony. Want to take a flight? Ditto.

Driving on the tolled highways, using water and electricity; from dawn to dusk our lives are controlled and suffocated by BN cronies so much so that Malaysia can be labelled as a Crony Nation.

The BN federal government’s strategy to create a large pool of cronies is made with the intent to broaden its vote base because the crony bosses will surely tell their employees to vote BN.

It is an open secret that the BN federal government’s hidden agenda is to strangle the Opposition Pakatan Rakyat (PR) in order to stay in power. Thus, the ones who will suffer the most are the poor and uneducated masses who will forever be shackled via the very chains of those whom they vote.

Only the elite, the powerful and the well-connected thrive in Crony Nation. Former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad has said that the Arab Spring will not occur in Malaysia. But can he be absolutely sure? It is not easy to read the mood of the masses. History has shown this time and time again.

For example the “Peasants Rebellion” during the Ming Dynasty in the year 1644 took place due to heavy taxes and rent repayment levied by the government. The rebel forces who had won wide popular support crushed the government army in many campaigns.

The rebel forces led by Li Zicheng then captured Beijing and Emperor Chongzhen of the Ming Dynasty committed suicide thus marking the end of the Ming Dynasty. This is history. Ditto the French Revolution in July 1789 and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in October 1917. When the oppressed peoples could not tolerate anymore oppression, there is bound to be unrest.

All the uprisings occur when power is concentrated in the hands of an elite few who continue to arrogantly flaunt their wealth as they oppress the citizens.

News travels quickly

The BN leaders have now become boastful and full of pride as they disdainfully ignore the rakyat’s pleas for a vibrant and transparent democracy. Questions on accountability are brushed aside in a brusque manner akin to swatting an irritating mosquito. The government must not be over-confident that the citizens are dumb and docile because once the situation reaches boiling point, it will be too late to do anything.

In this age of instant technology, news travels quickly. Perhaps that is the reason why broadband penetration is poor in the rural areas. The federal government intends to dumb-down the rural masses with the intention of forever feeding them government-controlled propaganda. As such the rural folk are the government’s fixed deposit vote bank in Crony Nation which works extremely hard to control and manipulate the minds of the masses. This is a distinct hallmark of crony nations anywhere.

It is very difficult for the opposition to make any inroads into the rural areas in Crony Nation. In the recent 10th Sarawak state election in April this year, Taib Mahmud’s PBS party chartered all the helicopters and boats to go into the interiors and therefore the opposition suffered a crushing defeat. The boats would not ferry the opposition’s supporters and voters into the polling centres.

Thus, it is not unusual for BN to win by landslide margins in Sabah and Sarawak.

Everything in Crony Nation is controlled by BN. This gives the lie to Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak’s Government Transformation Programme (GTP) which has undergone a metamorphosis into a mafia-like organisation. This is detrimental to the genuine small and medium business entrepreneurs who are not in the BN-mafia and will therefore fail to secure any business contracts or projects. It is clear that Najib’s rhetoric does not transcend into political will. As economy is linked to politics, will Malaysia become a failed state?

With the nation is firmly in the grasp of BN’s iron tentacles, their cronies will have free reign to amass wealth via monopolies in all sectors of the nation’s economy. This in turn will lead to nepotism and malpractices. A clear example of this is Umno minister Sharizat Abdul Jalil’s “Cattle-Condo Caper”, the project which was given to her by Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin who was the minister of agriculture at that material time.

It is not surprising then that Malaysia’s Corruption Perception Index is on a downhill slide, the latest from position number 56 to 60. This will certainly not inspire confidence in foreign investors. Does the BN federal government know that it does not take a rocket scientist to make this elementary deduction?

Still, the federal government continues to put into practice the concept of Crony Nation. For them it is business as usual as they continue to plunder the nation’s wealth. The latest shenanigan is the plundering of the citizens’ old-age life savings from the Employees Provident Fund (EPF) wherein RM55 billion was taken out by the government to be given to crony companies as unsecured loans. The EPF should be renamed the Eternal Plunderers’ Fund!

Irresponsible attitude

If for one reason or other the crony-companies/corporations fail to repay the loans, then civil unrest is a possibility as the rakyat’s savings go up in smoke. The government is playing with fire by playing with the rakyat’s savings.

The BN government’s irresponsible attitude in using citizens’ money to help out the crony corporations certainly smacks of bad governance and an absence of transparency and accountability but this is the norm in Crony Nation because the government controls all the national institutions.

No one can question the government and therefore they can do whatever they want. In Crony Nation, it is the law of no-law. And that is the reason why with the credibility of the government at rock bottom, there is the need by the government to engage dubious media and public relations companies to polish its image.

With the Eurozone crisis about to hit our shores, Malaysia’s market for exports will suffer a dent. This will affect the income of the low-wage earner especially the factory workers. But Crony Nation is a vile and merciless entity. Crony Nation is oblivious to the suffering of her citizens and continue to govern in a despotic manner.

The Cattle-Condo scandal is a clear indicator that Crony Nation has reached a point of no return. The government closes one eye, nay, two eyes to all these financial and economic scandals as they continue to thumb their nose at the rakyat.

Will Crony Nation continue to be the order of the day?

Selena Tay is an FMT columnist.