The Morning After – Part 1
KTemoc Konsiders
Najib has finally got his ‘mandate’, though from PKR’s view, under dodgy circumstances, wakakaka
A shocked and by now, broken hearted Anwar Ibrahim has cried foul as reported by TMI’s Crying foul, Anwar disputes GE13 results and will not accept those damning election results.
It’s also interesting to note than Pakatan has actually won the popular vote by amassing about 52% share of the total votes of GE-13 but was rewarded with only 40% of the shares of federal seats, whilst BN with 48% of total votes garnered 60% of the 222 federal seats. Only once before in Malaysia’s political history has a party with the majority of federal seats lost the popular vote, to wit, in 1969.
But this is a result of a combination of ‘first past the post’ contest combined with gross gerrymandering where in one federal constituency, only 12,000 registered voters can elect a MP to represent them in parliament while in another constituency, as many as 120,000 voters may only vote for also one MP to represent them. The voter in the former has ten times the say in parliament compared to his/her sardine-zed fellow Malaysian in the latter, perhaps a ‘lesser’ Malaysian.
The job of a truly independent impartial Election Commission, which of course doesn’t describe the Malaysian EC, would have endeavour to ensure the universal suffrage of ‘one person, one vote’ in a democracy, thus dividing the 222 federal constituencies into lots having an average of, say, 60,000 voters in each [some minor variations may be allowed but subject to justifications, etc]. Kapar would then be divided into Kapar East (or North) and Kapar West (or South) while Putrajaya doesn’t deserve to be be a federal seat by itself and would be subsumed under another Wilayah contituency or combined with Labuan as one.
But that’s only a pipe dream as the ruling party will never allow such impartial professionalism to come about for the EC. Let me share a very closed secret with you – the EC is in fact UMNO’s real fixed deposit, not just some pro-UMNO states.
Nonetheless, I would say, notwithstanding suspicions of UMNO’s alleged ‘creativity’ with the alleged help of the EC, Najib has done well not to let the BN lose and, what more, also in regaining BN’s control of Kedah and retaining rule in the Silver State, the latter very much to my surprise.
It’s a truism of politics that political parties lose elections, not win them.
While Najib was assisted by the master strategist and tactician, his mentor Dr Mahathir, in not losing the votes of the Heartland, he wasted previous federal seats in overindulging the extreme right-wing element of his party by allowing two losers in Zulkuifli Noordin and Ibrahim Ali to contest.
Ibrahim Ali was undoubtedly a concession to his mentor, but I wonder for the life of me why he had chosen Zulkifli Noordin, an automatic loser from the moment the religious bigot was nominated.
Then he compounded his mistake by marginalizing Ong Tee Keat just on the words of a loser like Chua Soi Lek, a MCA man who lacked objectivity, impartiality and coalition interests insofar as his intra-party chief political enemy is concerned.
Najib was lucky to not to lose despite wasting the 3 potential federal seats of Pasir Mas, Shah Alam and Pandan.
But f* gerrymandering and the popular vote because big business are elated with the BN victory. As TMI reported in its As results sink in, big winners are KL tycoons and Lynas as stocks rally:
Stocks surged as much as 6.8 per cent this morning and the ringgit jumped to a 10-month high, after Barisan Nasional (BN) extended its 56-year rule and fended off a strong opposition challenge that had unnerved investors.
The benchmark FTSE Bursa Malaysia KLCI Index rose to a lifetime high of 1,808.90 by 9.02am in response to yesterday’s general election, with stocks linked to the coalition and its favoured tycoons gaining handsomely, Reuters reported this morning.
Kowtim-ness has been preserved, wakakaka!
Ironically, in the midst of big business breaking open bottles of Dom Perignon, the biggest loser has been MCA, proving a point I made in another post that most Chinese business concerns have been bypassing MCA as they deem the Chinese political party as pretty useless in influencing the UMNO-led government on business and contracts.
And of course to some extent, a fellow loser to MCA is PAS, both of whom merit very little sympathy.
MCA has come to this nadir in its political life, again if I may add but worse than ever before, because of its own choosing. It’s a bloody miracle it managed to secure 6 parliamentary seats when it could have lost both Labis and Bentong as well.
Be that as it may, Chua Soi Lek should not have indulged in merajuk-ing (sulking) fashion in attributing the disaster for his party into a disgraceful racial parting shot at its political nemesis, the DAP. It’s not just sour grapes but poisonous langsat – indicating a bloody vindictive bangsat mindset.
The reason why MCA has lost so badly has been its reluctance to stand up for the community it claims to represent. As the post-election editorial in The Malaysian Insider said, MCA might as well dropped off the ‘C’ in its name. And MCA must suck on that!
MCA had believed it could continue to depend on the historically political passivity of the Chinese in Malaya-Malaysia for it to play an equally passive (and crumbs-begging cringing) role in the BN coalition, for the promotion and interests of its most influential lobby group, its crony the Chinese business towkays.
It failed and perhaps still fails to recognize that there is a new generation of Chinese Malaysians who aren’t so beholden to the overseas Chinese doctrine of lying (politically) low and quietly working for the traditional 3 bowls of rice.
These new Chinese generation consider themselves first and foremost as Malaysians rather than Chinese and thus want a say in the affairs of this nation, as citizens of their own land. They resent being treated as pendatangs, but they resent even more an MCA which did nothing to prevent the humiliation of their classification as lesser Malaysians.
Needless to say, the new generation Chinese identifying themselves as Malaysians are loud, with some even vicious, vile and venomous, but that’s the inevitable outcome of their pent-up feelings, right or wrong or somewhere in-between, of being humiliated, scorned and sneeringly dismissed for decades as pendatangs (and thus lesser creatures) and even children of prostitutes.
