Mahathir and the NSC law, what goes around comes around
Umar Mukhtar
It is the opinion of legal thinkers that the National Security Council law can be stretched to outrageous limits beyond one’s imagination. However, the present supporters of the Act think that that will be unlikely to happen under Prime Minister Najib Razak’s tenure. They all think like that and think that their idol will not be relinquishing power ever.
When Dr Mahathir Mohamad was the PM and prime mover of the law that enabled a bill passed by parliament to become a statute within thirty days even without the assent of the Yang Di-Pertuan Agong, he too must have told his supporters not to be unnecessarily worried and that he did not think any prime minister would actualise that. It is just not in the jurisprudential practice of Malaysians; we revere our kings. There we go again. Too bad Mahathir is not prime minister for life!
He probably said it was just to cut the rulers to size and presumably to prevent abuse by the rulers’ in holding up compulsory assent requirement unless they get whatever that they want in a hypothetical dispute which this democratic country can’t afford.
The rulers were supposedly misbehaving and even a special royal court Mahathir was setting up to put them in the dock if they misbehave would not be effective enough to put them in their place. So said Emperor Mahathir I from Kerala to his descendants.
See, Mahathir was so confident that he would have a strong say as to who to follow after him in the PM job. Most probably they would be those he anointed, followed by his sons and then his sons’ sons.
After all, that’s how it was done in Kerala before the British kicked them out. Dynasty, nepotism, call it whatever you want, it’s the same shit. So his court-jesters celebrated his wisdom, cheering wildly over the emperor’s new clothes.
Then came the rude awakening. The PMs after him didn’t give a fook to what Mahathir wanted. He had hoped to be the power behind the throne, sort of the Dowager Empress Kerala-style.
To prevail, Mahathir agitated all kinds of stuff to make the people rise. Over his first successor after him, he did prevail because there were still many of his little Napoleons all over the corridors of power.
By the time his second successor came to power, Mahathir’s courtiers are mostly already dead. Left alone with a handful of aging political cronies, he even had to resort to courting desperate hare-brained enemies to swallow his tale of bla, bla, bla, hook, line and sinker. But winning the support by those in the corridors of power is no longer the only game in town. Anyway, ‘dedak’ is no longer his monopoly to feed them with.
The second PM after him had dug into the legislative books and found Mahathir’s legacy of “Aturcara Derhaka Secara Halus Pada Raja” or the Archives of Legal Treason, and now Mahathir’s weapon of last resort is actualised in the form of the assent-less National Security Council law.
Thanks to the megalomaniac Mahathir, it is perfectly legal. The Rulers role as a check and balance in a constitutional monarchy has been effectively reduced. It is Najib’s legal right in his pursuant of whatever he thinks is good for the people. Mahathir the irrelevant can go scream to the marines all he wants!
Mahathir will dispute as to what it is that is good for the people, but his legal and political manoeuvres are much limited by that law. At the end, he will resort to sobbing and bitching over an ‘unfair law’ the way he recently wrote in his blog about the lack of the freedom of expression now prevailing. I laughed until I cried when I read that and I know many other people like Lim Kit Siang did, too, in the privacy of their homes. What goes around comes around, Mahathir!
Seriously, the Act is a done deal. So we can bitch all we want but I prefer to direct it at Mahathir. You’d wonder why I bothered when the dictator is no longer in power. Well, people like me, who had undergone the worst of Mahathir’s rule, dread to think that our free society is even thinking of allying with him against Najib.
Even the clown, Mat Sabu, who Mahathir jailed without trial, was ever so proud of warming up to him. Mat Sabu forgot that I got all his videotapes of his ceramahs where he reduced Mahathir to a pulp. The less I hear of them both the better. Good riddance.
As for Najib, he has now an ironclad defence against those who are against him. Oh, I forgot, Mahathir in his Declaration reminded us that we still have the Rulers to appeal to. It is a sign of Mahathir’s senility that when he wrote the Declaration. He forgot that he had done much damage to the royal institution to the point that an ex-PM like him has, for some reason, been unable to get a royal audience, what more challenge Najib.
Maybe Mahathir has to wait thirty days before the palace gates automatically open for his entourage of royalty-haters to kiss the hands of their royal highnesses in repentance.
