When Health Minister, MCA vice-president and MP for Labis Dr Chua Soi Lek chose to fall on his sword last week, it seemed to be proof of the old adage ‘live by the sordid, die by the sordid’.

The fall of the high and mighty is always a popular spectacle. It seems to reaffirm our fantasy that there’s some justice in the world after all.

But in fact disappointingly few major-league malefactors get their just desserts, especially in jurisdictions where they’re largely a protected species, as in Malaysia. So cases like this current sex scandal are the rare exception rather than the rule.

In any case it wasn’t fate that brought Chua undone, but a carefully-planned campaign, presumably by opponents in his own party or others in Barisan Nasional, that involved secretly video-taping him in action in a hotel room and systematically distributing his performance on DVD.

What motivated his attackers is anybody’s guess. Fear that his meteoric rise in the MCA was starting to pose a threat to party president Ong Ka Ting? Vengeance for his being the sole cabinet member to voice the view that Hindraf disaffections deserve a hearing?

Whichever, it may have been, it was the sheer viciousness of the political assault on him, rather than any sense of personal shame or contrition for his extramarital misdeeds, that pressured him to resign from all his official positions.

As devastated as he must have been by his plunge from power, he was hardly repentant or apologetic, only ruminating ruefully that “My mistake was to go to the same hotel and the same room all the time.”

In other words, he publicly regretted only his stupidity, not his cupidity. He may well feel much more pain privately, of course, as his wife Wong Sek Hin and other family members are unlikely to shrink from punishing him for exposing them to such notoriety.

And from all I’ve seen in blogs, letters to the editor and such, Malaysians in general seem to take the moral or even moralistic view that the man’s come-uppance has been well deserved.

Some more merciful souls have credited him with doing the honourable thing in the circumstances, in resigning of his own accord. But Deputy Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak, of all people, chose to depict Chua’s downfall as an object lesson to government leaders to behave themselves lest they embarrass the ruling coalition.

Opposition leader Lim Kit Siang couldn’t resist the temptation to remind Najib of his much-rumoured failure to practise what he was preaching, commenting that it was “like father crab telling baby crab to walk straight”.

Lim then went on to lambast Muar police chief Mohammad Nasir Ramli for proposed house-to-house searches to catch citizens in possession of the sex DVDs, instead of chasing down the culprits who illegally installed the hidden cameras and recorded the forbidden footage.

Powerful points

All this brings us to the distinction between grime and crime. Admittedly adultery is against the law in certain Middle-Eastern theocracies, so much so that it can be punished with death by stoning. But in Malaysia, as in the rest of the relatively civilised world, cheating on your spouse, as morally and ethically grimy as many may consider it to be, is no crime.

On the other hand, cheating on the public, as so many of Malaysia’s police personnel, politicians and potentates do, most certainly is a crime. Yet Chua has paid a heavy penalty for his actions, while the real arch-criminals go free.

There’s no point in my arguing this case at great length, as Josh Hong has already done so with his customary lucidity and style in his recent article ‘Sexual escapades in a moron state’.

Posing the question “should the powerful and influential former vice-president of the MCA have resigned from all his posts in the first place?” and replying “Probably not”, Hong first discussed the question of conflict between private morality and public interest.

He then highlighted many of the issues that Malaysia’s mainstream media should have investigated and aired about the affair, but which of course they failed to do, as they’re dedicated to cheating their readers and viewers in the service of their political proprietors.
And finally, after decrying Malaysian politicians’ reliance on smear campaigns and other dirty tricks to protect their positions, Hong closed with the crucial issue: “If Chua had to resign, why not Dr Ling Liong Sik, the former MCA president who while transport minister allegedly made use of his ministerial office to reach private deals with a Herr Franz Christoph Helwein, an Austrian businessman?

“And what about Rafidah Aziz over the Approved Permits scandal, Samy Vellu over the cracking bridges/flyovers and toll concessions shrouded in secrecy, and Chan Kong Choy over the Port Klang Free Trade Zone that is nothing but a white elephant?”

If we keep playing the ‘what about’ game, you and I and Hong would be here all day listing every case calling for not just resignations and sackings, but investigations and convictions, ranging from the collapse of Perwaja Steel to the plunder of Petronas funds; and the cost blow-out of the Matrade building to the blighted Bakun Dam.

But let’s not bore each other silly by belabouring the point which is, as Hong has so powerfully put it: “if Malaysians are consumed by moral outrage in the wake of Chua’s infidelity, condemning his acts while rushing to watch the tapes, yet show no interest in pressing for others who have failed their public duties to quit, what kind of country and society are we living in now?”

Or to put the question another way, if resignation was a fair penalty for Chua’s exercise in sexual grime, when are we going to see some proper prosecution and punishment of those responsible for Malaysia’s obscene levels of corporate and political crime?