What happened to the Malaysian utopia crafted by our constitution-framers?

Umar Mukhtar

Let me be perfectly clear. If anybody, Prime Minister Najib Razak included, had manipulated financial transactions involving public funds of government-owned units entrusted to him in order to enrich himself, and then covered up the shortfall by transferring public properties to the said units at ridiculously cheap prices to be revalued at much higher prices later, that is wrong, very, very wrong. That person should be sent to prison.

Most Malaysians would agree to that. But the issue is, it appears that the people are not able to be satisfied that the above is true because any public scrutiny, in any form, is frustrated by the system. That is the issue.

So let’s change the system to allow for greater transparency and accountability. Looks like a revolution of sorts is needed. But it has to be one that is peaceful, not the Arab Spring type, and the people are assured that they get to be participatory and that the replacement system is invariably better. How does the Mahathir-Lim Kit Siang declaration plan to do that? By all means, please reveal the details for our scrutiny.

There is a general election coming. Show us your detailed plans, and if it makes sense, you will be voted in so that you can change the system. Oh, it’s not as easy as that? The election process is rigged, it may not even be held, and issues of chauvinism will blur issues? Really? So how did we manage all this while?

Let me give you an idea simplistically how we did it.

The ruling party, which represented the majority voters, practise policies that were majority-biased to shore up its support. The minority struggled to keep the ruling party honest and persevered in many ways to render those policies not to be fully effective in a friendly way. In the meantime, the circus goes on and champions of this or of that get to be relevant.

And because policy-makers and implementers were corruptible enough to allow and render policies to be a joke on the ground, a tolerable balance was reached by all parties. Whether you are happy or not, Malaysia remains liveable. Just keep the racket going by all parties and we are okay. This assessment to crude for you?

So what happened?

What happened was somebody may have taken too much, too fast, too blatantly, too thick-skinned to fook off when discovered and too brash to protect himself in a way Malaysians are accustomed to. He then incurred the wrath of the system designer.

What happened was the system designer did not get his cut and overriding commissions both in terms of money and influence in deciding the future of Malaysia. That was an implied breach of the anointment and inheritance rules.

What happened was the minority party saw this split among the majority as an opportunity to ‘level’ the playing field but is cautious that the change may involve drastic and traumatic changes to the majority, so it co-opts the system designer in its plans, even though he represents the very epitome of what the minority fight against.

What happened was the injection of a new element of Islamic revivalism, not present before or immediately after Merdeka, into the conscience of the majority. Nowadays it is not clear if politics is Islamism, nationalism, or racism. In any order. That confuses the minority whose rudder by tradition has always been pointed towards materialism. Things will have to be reconfigured.

So will the Mahathir-LKS declaration be the start of a new Malaysia as LKS claimed? Why not, if the system designer is a changed and repentant man. And pigs can fly.