COMMENT Opposition parties, old and new, do not and never will make money from the economy - unless they join the ruling regime. Just ask Gerakan, and others in the BN coalition.

Ask the wonderfully useless Gerakan dullard, former Penang chief minister Koh Tsu Koon, who left the state in a parlous financial and social condition after buggerising around with his Umno patrons who, in turn, rewarded his incompetence with an underserved, pointless and worthless senatorship and a ministerial gig in the equally incompetent and corrupt Umno-controlled regime.

It seems that if one isn’t capable of being politically astute, adept and intelligent, then one may as well try to make as much money as possible, by hook or crook, whilst parading one’s self-importance, like Najib Abdul Razak, Muhyiddin Yassin, Rais Yatim, Abdul Gani Patail, Khairy Jamaluddin, Hishammuddin Hussein, Nazri Aziz, Chua Soi Lek and countless others, including the regime’s “little Napoleons”.

This seems to be Umno-BN’s raison d’être for staying in power. Ruling Malaysian politicians handsomely reward mediocrity, and themselves, at the expense of ordinary Malaysian taxpayers and Malaysians in general. Case in point? Former Selangor menteri besar Mohamed Khir Toyo, who has been indicted for corruption - of whom the regime has made a scapegoat but his Umno bosses will surely look after him, come hell or high water. Or neither, in the end.

Should the Pakatan governments make a good show of their state economies and bring state budgets strongly into the black, kudos to them for their hard work, aptitude and public service. But if any of them should ever be found to have lined their pockets in the process, they should be flogged in public. Which is what is unmistakably deserving of Umno-BN politicians and ministers. Or perhaps, fittingly, use the legal recourse of Saudi Arabia and other Islamic states.

Far too many imponderables

All of which brings us back to the new opposition parties in the offing: what on earth for? It cannot be said that there are so many ‘hanging’ votes that all the opposition parties will be able to divvy them up more or less equally amongst themselves, assuming, of course, that voters will fundamentally sway toward the opposition at the next general election.

There is nothing written in the sky or in the palms of bomohs that says this indeed will happen or, for that matter, that Umno-BN will win the next federal poll with a clear two-thirds majority. There are far too many domestic imponderables as there are political and economic externalities. Economic externalities will feed the political, and in turn both will likely mitigate, at the very least, and however temporarily, the domestic imponderables.

It is one thing for the new opposition parties to say or think that there is enough room in the Malaysian polity for their emergence to be wholly relevant to national or state politics, and to make a concrete difference to the aspirations and lives of voters and Malaysians in general who are routinely ignored or discarded by Umno-BN.

NONEIt is another thing to say that the politics of disenchantment is sufficient reason to strike out on one’s own, as in the case of Parti Kita, and start new political parties and draw new voter alignments whilst thinking - foolishly - that they can affect the old political configuration.

If poaching worked once before, it was only because Umno bought former Pakatan politicians. The colour of money is god and the god of greed is a self-serving god.

A good analogy is the RM900 billion that was smuggled out of Malaysia to offshore financial safe havens. Either this loot has been squirrelled away into Swiss bank accounts and elsewhere or it is a massive money-laundering racket directed by the Umno-BN regime or has its blind consent. Odds on that most if not all of this money belong to Umno-BN politicians, their cronies and nepotists.

As elections draw closer, other turncoats will ‘flee’ Pakatan on the scent of red envelopes stuffed with crisp new notes from the vaults of Bank Negara, Khazanah Holdings or Petronas. Certainly there has not been a reversal of that outflow from Umno-BN to Pakatan. Nor will there be likewise to the new political parties.

Another sorry chapter in humbug

Zaid’s Ibrahim’s defection from Umno to Pakatan turned out to be a blip. He promised much, made some choice noises, but delivered nothing. Now he is making new noises. He is preaching philosophically of the dawning of new politics in Malaysia. This will all come to represent another sorry chapter in humbug.

Over the years a number of influential Asians and academics have tried to convince the world that Asian governments and political leaders are quintessentially ‘pragmatic’ and ‘visionary’. Noordin Sopiee, former director of the Umno-BN sponsored ISIS in Kuala Lumpur, headlined that act. The Malaysian regime recruited its supporters widely.

Example: There was a fellow, a self-absorbed Hindu, at the Institute for Policy Studies - a Lee Kuan Yew-PAP sponsored think-tank housed at the National University of Singapore - who tried to paint Mahathir Mohamad as a demigod. And all the way up and down North-East and South-East Asia, who beat the drums of Asian exclusivism from their fatuously cultural relativist positions.

Political idealism is wonderful if a new party’s cause is true and just, even if it knows it could be wrong or is fogged by sentimentalism or ‘unrealistic realism’. But this, in itself, can become a major problem.

Similarly the plurality of opposition parties will not distinctively add to the possibility, or indeed probability, of any opposition party winning government from the ruling regime, any more than selective reforms will guarantee greater market competition in an economy.

In fact there is a good likelihood that the plurality of opposition parties could [further] hollow out or muddy the complexities of the gamut of often-emotive political messages. Those messages are almost entirely loaded with racial undertones or overtones.

New political parties may be seen as pivotal moments in autocratic polities or societies. In Malaysia’s case, new opposition parties could be a negative development, especially in the context of the scarcity of finite resources. And after 53 years of sheer political bastardry by the ruling Malay regime, all political parties have shown only their hard-bitten political immaturity and a dire absence of organic intelligence and sophistication.

They seem incapable of transcending old politics. If there’s one thing that they share with Umno-BN, it is winning power - at all costs - even if their political machinations and idealisms are seriously flawed, and will likely flounder despairingly.

Zaid Ibrahim and Parti Kita, and others about to launch new opposition parties, must explain, in the most unambiguous terms, how they will translate their political idealism into winning political formulae, given the hard realities of a country that is so miserably riddled with the mediocrity of its politicians, especially those in power - and in opposition ranks - of the Umno-BN thugs who wield national and state power through their political machinery, the same thugs who are so utterly inept, immoral and corrupt but who, by virtue of their political control, also rule the national coffers.

How can messages of unfettered disgust for the real realism of Malaysian politics be used as righteous political idealism - without politicians becoming so self-righteous - against and in indignation of the regime’s mafia and outright racists?

Cheap talk amply exhibited

How will their political idealism transmute concretely into their becoming a cogent and viable alternative political force that must, at its core, have the single-minded purpose of not only winning government but also unifying the people of all races and building an economy in which all peoples will have a direct stake and is free of corruption?

Because talk is cheap, and cheap talk has been amply exhibited for decades by all sides of politics.

Conscionable voters have long been chided, coerced, abused, ignored or discarded by the ruling regime. They have been marginalised. They struggle every day of their wretched lives. These voters do not care for political idealism. Voters no longer want to be sold dreams; they want to know how elected politicians will assuage their every day problems and create clearer paths for the future.

They worry about the real realism that surrounds and badgers their everyday lives. And this has been going on since the introduction of the racist New Economic Policy in 1970. They worry about jobs, education, not living in poverty or debt. They worry about access to health services, better security, fairness and justice, and about opportunities for their children and grandchildren to harness a better, more equal and harmonious future.
 
In one of his seminal essays Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses - a novel the Malay regime banned - wrote: “Free societies are societies in motion, and with motion comes friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom’s existence.” When free people cross boundaries, they step across lines.

In Malaysia, when people try to step across the line, the regime’s uneducated thugs beat them up or kill them, and the country’s supinely pliant and corrupt judiciary either brushes away complaints or cowardly delivers open verdicts.

There is no flowering of democracy in Malaysia, any more than a pre-existing one is thriving. There is no democracy in Malaysia. If one existed, it certainly died in 1969. If one exists now, it does only in name.

Elections held at regular intervals do not always equate to a full-flung democracy at work. There are elections in Iran, but they are meaningless to the obtuse rightwing Islamic mullahs and the loopy president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Likewise Afghanistan, and its phony president Hamid Karzai. And Burma and Cambodia and Vietnam and Singapore - all Asean friends, partners and neighbours.

Mammoth democratic deficit

Between now and the next polls, Umno-BN will up the ante with a flurry of dirty tricks, a pool of sleaze, and, of course, its alienum aras arvum, to throw the opposition parties into wild disarray.

pkr congress 281110 nurul izzah anwarNurul Izzah (right), daughter of Anwar Ibrahim, is right about one thing: there is a mammoth democratic deficit in Malaysia. She argues, correctly, that it is up to the people to demand democracy. That’s a tall order. But it is needed if, on current form, Malaysia looks headed towards another May 13, 1969 carnage.

No number of new political parties can escape the bare-chested fact that opposition parties, old and new, will need to convince a colossal number of Malaysians to freely cross the line, without fear or favour or money inducements.

Until this happens they will likely fail in their political project. They will achieve only notoriety for their seriously spurious claims. And worse, far worse in fact, they will have only helped Umno-BN maintain - and further entrench - the status quo.

Minerva’s Owl: In Greek and Roman mythology, Glaucus is the symbolic owl of Athena or Minerva, respectively. Often referred to as the “owl of Athena” or “owl of Minerva”, it accompanies Minerva in Roman myths, seen as a symbol of wisdom because the owl is capable of seeing even in the dark and of vigilance because the owl is awake at night.

The nineteenth-century idealist philosopher GWF Hegel famously noted that “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk” - meaning that philosophy comes to understand a historical condition just as it passes away. Philosophy cannot be prescriptive because it understands only in hindsight. (Wikipedia)

Yesterday: BN’s bastardry of politics

 


MANJIT BHATIA is an Australian academic, writer and journalist. He is also research director of AsiaRisk, a risk analysis consultancy. He now divides his life and work between Australia, Britain and the US.