Taib: a virtuoso of subtle divide-and-rule

 

From Terence Netto

Whenever a big political personage dies in Malaysia, the obituary notices in the press invariably would pile one worthless cliché after another.

All hope of an objective assessment of the life and career of the deceased will disappear under a fog of encomiums.

If the Latin poet Plutarch was right in observing that “ingratitude to their great leaders is a mark of strong peoples”, then Malaysians are not an intrepid people.

They will douse even their mediocre leaders in a hagiographic glaze in which all possibility of overall judgement is smothered.

This tendency will augment the myth and obscure the whole person.

The death earlier this week of Abdul Taib Mahmud, the chief minister of Sarawak for an interminably long time (1983 to 2014) and then the state’s governor for two terms (2014-2024) , will be lamented by the people of his state for two things.

He skilfully manoeuvred to keep Umno, at the height of its greed, out of Sarawak politics.

He was encouraged in that gambit by Sarawakians’ dread of what happened to Sabah after the Peninsula hegemon’s entry into that north Borneo state, an intrusion that was a discharge of vindictive rancour by Dr Mahathir Mohamad against Pairin Kitingan for the latter’s apostasy on the eve of the 1990 general elections.

Taib’s fiscal discipline with Sarawak’s budget meant he did not have need of federal provisions to tide over annual deficits, a feature Kitingan, in the years of his quasi-independence of the Peninsula’s hegemony, was unable to achieve in Sabah, inviting Umno’s cotton-picking attention.

Thus, Taib earned the grudging admiration of Sarawak’s natives as he worked to keep each community contented by amply rewarding compliant brokers of the Dayak vote onside while excluding recalcitrants.

This forestalled intra-Dayak collaboration to derail the Melanau ascendancy his guileful uncle Rahman Yaacob had plotted from the late 1960s when he was the federal minister for education and courtier of then prime minister Razak Hussein.

It was a virtuoso act of divide and rule.

The hypothesis that both uncle and nephew shrewdly conspired to divide the majority Dayak community by fomenting what came to be called the Ming Court Affair in early 1986 gained currency in later decades when the outmanoeuvred victims had time to ruefully mull what happened and why.

It was vintage divide-and rule politics, in which Umno was reduced to a spectating role, unconcerned simply because uncle and nephew were effective in delivering the state to the Peninsula hegemon whenever federal elections came round and intra-Umno divisions threatened splits in the Malay bloc.

It was a neat division of labour, with Barisan Nasional gaining at the federal level while uncle and nephew forged their stateside monopoly at the local level.

It was a demonstration of how local supremos can work their schemes within the folds of a hegemon’s overarching plans.

The upshot: the minnows get shafted. - 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.