For Malaysia, it’s back to the good old times

“Once senility has come upon a dynasty, it cannot be made to disappear.”

– Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah (1377 AD)

Two regime changes in less than two years says an awful lot about the place. Malaysia is a basket case – a Third World country with grand pretensions of turning First World by 2020, with democratic affectations. Dream on.

The long and short of the past week’s psychosis is that there are no winners in that seemingly perennial cockup that is Malaysian politics – other than politicians of course. 

Taxpayers (still) pay them handsomely, plus a collection of perks, for doing nothing. Meanwhile, the crisis continues – one that’s within a hair’s breadth of approximating to an out-and-out legitimation crisis. 

One major loser just got hit by the politicians’ fracas – an amalgam called Malaysians; what folks call rakyat. Where are you now?

Who cares now who did what, where, how and to whom. It’s passé. Water under the bridge. Though the stench will stay forever. It’s hard to imagine the 10 days that shook Malaysia to its core is different to previous attempts at character assassination cast around vile and vicious claims of a person’s loathsome behaviour. The French call it sordidité, and for good reason.

Muhyiddin Yassin may be the eighth prime minister but he’ll go down in history as the Belakang Masuk PM, aided and abetted by Umno president Ahmad Zahid Hamidi, who faces court over RM13 million corruption, PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang and the ever-reliable former PKR deputy president Azmin Ali. All three have form. If you’re a betting person you’d put your last sen on these ponies to make you a neat little bundle. What the goings-on illustrate is a serious famine of competent, decent politicians and deepening distrust of politicians by the public.

Muhyiddin has no qualms about sleeping with the devil. He says he did it for the sake of the country in the political vacuum created by former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad playing political silly games. But to sidle up to the three men, besides making for one heck of a foursome frolic, raises questions about Muhyiddin’s strength of character and judgement. In the end, it was unadulterated opportunism – political and personal.

Along with Azmin, Zahid and Hadi, Muhyiddin sold out his last specks of morality and integrity for personal glory. He can’t deny Mahathir had passed him over three times to anoint him as the next PM. He saw a wormhole and took advantage. Cunning, granted.

But to deliriously cavort with downright racists is the hallmark of a desperate man. But, wait: Didn’t he one time say he’s “Malay first”? Yet Malaysian analysts, these supposed academics, crawled out of the woodwork to confirm in peerless kowtow fashion that Muhyiddin is a man of saintly principles and high mind. Pfft! Prove it.

Mahathir, the doctor in the house, tried playing the long game, then tried to ‘short’ it, thinking he’d get to shoot a penalty without the goalie, the last line of defence. He played to the public gallery for sympathy, given they saw him as having saved them from the claws of the ousted Najib Abdul Razak and Umno-BN. He assumed too much. People too had assumed too much of Mahathir: he was never their demigod, in the parlance of Greek mythology. But for his troubles, he got egg on his face. A whole dozen – deservedly.

PKR president Anwar Ibrahim, Mahathir’s frenemy, desperate as a cornered mouse, tried head off Mahathir, then tried to head off his archbane Azmin, then tried to head off his newest archvillain Muhyiddin. He lost. Lost real big. And at 72, he’d be lucky to get another crack at becoming PM, even if Muhyiddin carks it in office.

Muhyiddin also played the long game. Who would’ve thought he had the faculty to outfox the fox who people so credulously said for decades couldn’t be outfoxed. Just goes to show. But that’s not all: Muhyiddin outwitted Anwar too, despite the latter’s pompous philosophising. Talk about knocking off two birds with one stone. And they were big buzzards. Bigger than any political figure from Malaysia’s past.

Nursery rhyme

What will come next? Simple, quickest, honest answer: Who knows. Except for the slew of wild and woolly promises. The old caper.

Mahathir can’t see the king because the king won’t see Mahathir. End of that story. End of him, too. Sayonara. Hasta la vista, baby. This matter won’t wind up in court because to challenge it in court is to ipso facto challenge the king, and that’s a no-no. And Anwar has already signalled he’s moving on to focus on the people’s plight. So, game on or not? Of course, it’s on.

Will parliament sit on March 9? The speaker on Sunday said he’d “officially” write to Muhyiddin on Monday to ask – ask, konon – if parliament will be sitting next Monday. What did he fancy Muhyiddin would tell him: Yeah, sure; knock yourself out?

Or is Muhyiddin now like the king in the popular nursery rhyme? You’ve probably forgotten it, or don’t know it, seeing English hasn’t been the medium of instruction in Malaysia for donkey’s years. Here’s not the modern rendition of the rhyme but the original version as it appeared in Tommy Thumb’s ‘Pretty Song Book’ circa 1744 in London. The first verse went like this:

Sing a song of sixpence

A bag full of rye

Four and twenty naughty boys

Baked in a pie

Familiar? It goes on about the king in his counting house counting out his money.

Transpose this to Muhyiddin counting out his statutory declarations. Big roaring business these SDs. He’d be hoping he hasn’t screwed up with his count, that he hasn’t ‘misled’ the king. He’d be praying he has 112 supporting SDs for a simple majority to rule; 114 to win an extra breath; 120, at least, to survive a cardiac arrest.

Muhyiddin wouldn’t want his trusted Azmin to perform CPR on him if the crunch came. Because in Bolehland, anything goes. Yessiree, Bob: You’re all back in mighty Bolehland. Well and truly back in the thick of its old bile. And you can’t go past the real losers who aren’t political cretins.

Right up to May 9, 2018, the losers were sold Umno lemons – 61 unbroken years of rabid racism, lies, corruption, cronyism, kleptocracy. Then for 22 months after that, they were sold the Malaysia Baru lemon, which, clearly, never stood a chance. Never planted a single root the entire time. Last weekend the losers got – ho, ho, ho! – an early Christmas present. This lemon, however, is the size of a monster artocarpus heterophyllus, nangka, with the smell of durian rotten through and through.

The losers are the Malays – those fine ordinary Malays who couldn’t, wouldn’t, back Umno and their voiceless, spineless muppets in the MCA and the MIC, and PAS leaders.

And the non-Malay losers – constantly and maliciously dubbed 'pendatang' by Malay fascist nationalists and charlatans. The “nons” will be hammered again by the ‘pertama saya Melayu’ types. So will the Orang Asli – the real, genuine bumiputera from whom the Malay fascist nationalists and charlatans stole their lands, purloined their livelihoods, and hung them out to dry.

The only Malaysian who stands out, for me at any rate, is Fadiah Nadwa Fikri (above) – the fearless, articulate, intelligent Malay political activist and human rights lawyer. Already the police is persecuting her (and other well-known activists) for her anti-Belakang Masuk politics public stance at the weekend.

It’s back to the good old days. The good times.

Recriminations will come

Harapan is dead. Malaysia Baru was stillborn. Get used to it. Recriminations will come. Mahathir has started the ball rolling, blaming everyone for the debacle he created and mismanaged but himself. The old story.

Hopefully decent, thinking Malaysians won’t feel the game’s up, that they should re-familiarise themselves with the return of putrid Umnoism, hopefully not for 61 more years for Umnoists to burgeon people with their profligate sanctified moral decadence and intuitive sense for pilfering.

Malaysians mustn’t sit back. They must mobilise. Together. All races. All classes (but the self-seeking rich and filthy-rich).

There’s every likelihood Bersatu will absorb Umno, not for brethren’s sake but out of politico-ideological necessity. Or Umno will emasculate Bersatu. The latter is odds-on.

Will either move make any substantive difference to the lives of Malaysians? Hell no. Just worse. Now watch who the Muhyiddin regime begins to sack from or wheedle in the previous regime’s institutions. I suspect Latheefa Koya, or Kak Lat, will be at the top of Muhyiddin’s hit list.

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MANJIT BHATIA is a reader of international political-economy with focus on Asia.  - Mkini