COMMENT Despite Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak’s much beloved 1Malaysia campaign, which has the slogan ‘people first, performance now’, what happens day-to-day on the ground in Malaysia may give enough grounds for critics to be proven right in their assertion that the reality is anything but that.

This comes following the recent spate of preferential treatment that has been thrown the way of certain government ministers and members of Najib’s Umno entourage of late.

azlan One minister bent over backwards to “exempt” a fellow Umno politician from a rule governing cooperatives that the rest of the rakyat must follow, providing him with a backdoor entry into a certain high profile cooperative’s board, and another minister gave a free ride for a much-coveted plate number bid, for which even a sultan had to pay.

Not to mention an insensitive minister in ostensible charge of higher education whose Twitter jibe over the freeze of education loans to university students belies his appointed cabinet position.

The freeze, even if justifiable by whichever obscure technicalities, should not be the point of a joke by a minister supposedly in charge of the welfare of our students in institutions of higher learning.

For his jibes, the minister would deserve the epithet, as my old friend would have said, of “higher learning minister my posterior”.

It is also perhaps not too out of turn to mention the scandalously wealthy lifestyle of many so-called public servants, politicians who live like kings and queens.

Is there a special rule anywhere in the constitution that say ministers and BN politicians reserve the right to practice stupidity, squander the public trust and treasury, get preferential treatment or have first pick of things?

Not that I know of. But that does not seem to stop them from their Genghis Khan-like rampage.

What they are practicing is indeed akin to a modern-day Prima Nocta, with the prize being less alluring but no less disturbing.

Prima Nocta was the right used by nobles in the past to have sexual rights to the wife of a newly-married man on the night of their wedding.

In this case it would seem that politicians, while not yet given the right to sleep with our spouses on our wedding night, do seem to be conducting procreation activities with our rights left, right and centre.

Unashamed to ride roughshod over us all

Indeed such realities can only serve to reinforce allegations that the political elite and their families are not only entrenched in Malaysia’s political and wealth structure, but are also unashamed to ride roughshod over us all.

But they would do well to learn from the tales of William Wallace, if its Hollywood retelling in the movie Braveheart is to be believed, whose outrage over an English noble’s practice of Prima Nocta over his newly-wed wife had led to a revolution that threw the English out of Scotland.

Or perchance the tale of King Louis XVI of France and his queen Marie Antoinette, whose extravagance in the face of a poor rakyat led to that iconic storming of the Bastille which toppled not only the kingdom but also saw its monarchs murdered in a most horrible way.

NONE The Arab Spring is no exception, leading to the fall of corrupt, unrepentant and lavish and extravagant leaders who met their downfall like so many dominoes.

The Arab Spring, the French Revolution and the Wars of Scottish Independence are perhaps “not our culture”, as one minister in charge of culture is fond of saying, but they should realise and must know that it is human nature to react and rise up when one is pushed down by oppression.

This is the truth that they may yet discover if they do not stop parading their extravagant, pompous and arrogant posteriors to rub in the rakyat’s faces.

It may not be a violent uprising, but indeed may be a landslide vote, but regardless of whichever avalanche, the corrupt and power-crazy will and shall be taken to task one way or the other. To this they should all be forewarned.

HAZLAN ZAKARIA is a member of the Malaysiakini team.