By any measure you can think of, Malaysia has been on a losing streak for decades under the leadership - or rather the misleadership and bleedership - of the Barisan Nasional regime.

But this gang of crooks posing as a political coalition has no way of going straight even if it wanted to, as reform would entail retribution for countless crimes by its members and cronies, not to mention repayment of the untold billions they’ve plundered from the people.

So all BN can do in the face of its steady loss of credibility, respect and support is to redouble its lying and looting in hopes of postponing its eventual and inevitable loss of power.

Najib Abdul Razak, the biggest loser in BN history by virtue of his failure to win the popular vote in the 13th general election, despite its being comprehensively rigged in his favour, first blamed what he called the “Chinese tsunami” for his humiliation, and is now giving the lie to his post-election promise to be “prime minister for all Malaysians” by warning the Chinese community not to make demands of the government while supporting the opposition.

“I like to do more (for the Chinese community), maybe one day I can do more, but I also need the Chinese community to support BN, come on,” Malaysiakini reported him as blustering to the MCA annual general meeting.

“You have to do your part, you cannot demand and then support DAP, you cannot demand (and then) support Pakatan Rakyat,” he went on, adding that “(if) you demand, and you support BN, we will be fair to the Chinese.”

In other words, far from “prime minister for all Malaysians”, Najib is prepared to share BN power and plunder exclusively with supporters of his crooked regime, while punishing critics of its unconstitutional and outright criminal activities with charges of sedition.

Or as former Bar Council and Bersih chairperson Ambiga Sreenevasan (right) recently told a fundraising dinner for social reform movement Aliran, Najib is typical of Malaysian leaders who pretend to be “democratic” and “liberal” when overseas, as in his lying speech to the UN General Assembly a couple of weeks ago, but are “oppressive monsters” at home.

Ambiga reminded her audience that Najib had treated those who bothered to turn up to his UN appearance to such pious platitudes as “we must break the cycle where one group rules with power only to wield it against the other,” as his BN regime continues to do, and that “individuals and ethnic and religious groups need to feel they have space in a nation’s success not its failure so we should commit to more inclusive politics.”

Divisive outrages

When in fact, contrary to “inclusive politics”, Najib’s regime and its racist and religionist stooges keep committing blatantly divisive outrages against non-Malay races and non-Muslim religions.

As in the threat by Perkasa’s Ibrahim Ali to burn Christian Bibles, and forgiveness of this outrage by the attorney-general, according to Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Nancy Shukri on the grounds that it was in keeping with the constitution, and in any case “not a crime as it was in defence of Islam”.

And speaking of defence of Islam, as if this or any other religion needed defending by a coterie of lying criminals, the regime has made no apparent objection to the statement by some loser’s writing on the Isma website under the pseudonym ‘Rizal’ that “Islam on top while kafir below is needed for the well-being of humanity.”

“The history of mankind has shown how the world became prosperous when Islam was in power for 1,300 years,” this ridiculous rant continued. “Before and after that era, the world suffered due to oppression, murder, exploitation (and) manipulation by the media as well as deterioration in morals and culture.”

A clear case of the pot calling the kettle black, considering how aptly this litany of evils characterises most if not all contemporary Islamic or Muslim-majority nations, very much including BN’s Malaysia.

Where the ruling regime’s unholy record of oppression, murder and exploitation is subject to such gross manipulation by the BN-dominated so-called ‘mainstream’ media that these fake ‘news’ organisations have lost every shred of credibility.

Most of their circulations too, in the case of alleged ‘newspapers’ like the New Straits Times, The Star and especially Utusan Malaysia, the scurrilous, racist rag that regime Information, Communications and Multimedia Minister Ahmad Shabery Cheek recently attempted to defend with an outrageous lie.

Ahmad Shabery had the sheer effrontery to claim that Malaysia’s disgraceful 147th ranking out of 180 countries on the Reporters Without Borders world press-freedom index is due, at least in part, to the DAP Penang government’s sometime ban on Utusan Malaysia reporters from state parliament rather than the BN regime’s poisonous Printing Presses and Publications Act.

And speaking of lying losers, Youth and Sport Minister Khairy Jamaluddin has taken time out from overseeing Malaysia’s abysmal under-performance in the football, athletic and other sporting arenas to claim that the Bar Council’s recent walk in protest against the Sedition Act had not made an impact, and that this showed that Malaysians want the law to stay “if there is no selective prosecution and legitimate dissent against the government is not targeted.”

A very big ‘if’

A very big “if” indeed, given that selective prosecution and the targeting of legitimate dissent are, as always, the order of the day under BN.

As, of course, is systematic looting, as currently exemplified by the raising of a clearly suspicious RM4 billion government-guaranteed loan by the BN regime’s dodgy-looking 1Malaysia Development Bhd (1MDB) via some mysterious if not outright secret entity called SRC International Sdn Bhd.

Then there are all the customary questions surrounding the direct, untendered RM77 million liquor security-labelling contract awarded by Royal Malaysian Customs to Haris Onn Hussein (left), brother of Defence Minister Hishammuddin Hussein.

Hishammuddin, under whose watch Malaysia has suffered at least two notable losses, that of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 and the more recent temporary disappearance of a Malaysian Navy gunboat, claimed to be losing no sleep as a result of his brother’s unaccountable commercial win.

Denying the possibility of conflict of interest, he said that his brother “did not receive any contract from any of the ministries that I was, or am, in charge of, so the issue of conflict of interest does not arise.”

In short, as I said up front, it’s BN business as usual, and thus Malaysia and Malaysians will always and forever be losers until they finally find the wherewithal to tell these lying looters to get well and truly lost.


DEAN JOHNS, after many years in Asia, currently lives with his Malaysian-born wife and daughter in Sydney, where he coaches and mentors writers and authors and practises as a writing therapist. Published books of his columns for Malaysiakini include ‘Mad about Malaysia', ‘Even Madder about Malaysia', ‘Missing Malaysia', ‘1Malaysia.con’ and ‘Malaysia Mania’.