Muafakat Nasional cannot make it on their own

Hang Tuah and Hang Jebat may or may not have existed. But that is all in the past. All those silat prowess and magical keris cannot win battles today. Today, all it takes is a bullet between the eyes to finish off the greatest silat master with his most sakti keris. So, get real, and stop living in the past. Today is the era of coalitions, not of sole warriors.

NO HOLDS BARRED

Raja Petra Kamarudin

When I say Muafakat Nasional, I mean both Umno and PAS. And, today, I want to talk about what most political analysts do not talk about, which is Malaysians vote along ethnic lines. And ethnicity here includes both race and religion (or cultural, if you wish to call it that).

Say what you like, a Malay is a Malay. He may be a “modern” Malay. He may be a “traditional” Malay. There is actually no difference between the two, as much as some try to divide the Malays into two groups — the so-called “liberal” Malays and the “conservative” Malays.

What do they mean by “liberal” Malays and “conservative” Malays? How different are the two? Would these so-called “liberal” Malays dare challenge the authenticity of the Qur’an? How do they know the Qur’an came from God (or Allah)? How can they prove the Qur’an came from God? Are they accepting that the Qur’an came from God based on faith or based on evidence?

Yes, “liberal” Malays and “conservative” Malays are the same. Both believe that the Qur’an came from God based on faith, or maybe even blind faith, without demanding any evidence to prove the authenticity of the Qur’an.

In short, both the so-called “liberal” Malays and “conservative” Malays are two peas in a pod. There is no difference between the two. Hence there is only one Malay, not two Malay groups.

So, what then divides the Malays (because the Malays are definitely divided)? The thing that divides the Malays is politics. And the rural Malays have a different political inclination to the urban Malays. It is the same in the UK and the US as well. Rural British or rural Americans think differently from urban British and urban Americans.

At the time of Merdeka, 98% of the Malays were rural Malays. Hence Umno and PAS (or Muafakat Nasional today) monopolised Malaysian politics. Today, only 23% of the Malays are rural Malays. Hence the day when the Malays became urbanised was the beginning of the end for Umno and PAS.

(In Indonesia it is 44% rural, Thailand 49%, Philippines 53%, Bangladesh 63%, Pakistan 66%, India 66%, China 40%, Singapore 0%, etc.).

And the reason for this urbanisation of the Malays is education and development. As long as the Malays remain uneducated (or only receive a sekolah kampung education) and as long as there are no factories in towns for the Malays to migrate to in search of work (meaning the Malays remain in the kampung) then Umno and PAS have a captive market.

Education and development are bad for political domination. It changes the way people think and changes where they live. And this is what Umno and PAS are suffering from — a change of mentality, attitude and values of the Malays. A Gua Musang Malay is not the same as a Subang Jaya Malay even though the parents and/or grandparents of the Subang Jaya Malay were born in Gua Musang.

In the past (in the 1950s and 1960s), Umno and PAS could have united under Muafakat Nasional and these two parties alone could have formed the Federal Government without anyone else. In the first General Election in 1959, Umno and PAS won 57% of the votes and 62.5% of the seats (the Alliance Party — UMNO, MCA and MIC — and PAS won 73% of the votes and 84% of the seats).

So Umno and PAS (or Umno, PAS, MCA and MIC) do not need anyone else to form the government at both federal level and in all the states.

In the 14th general election in 2018, the combined votes for Umno and PAS dropped to 37% while their combined seats dropped to 32%, a far cry from GE1 in 1959. Is it a coincidence that the Malay rural population also dropped from 98% to 23%?

I lived almost 20 years in Kuala Lumpur (1956 to 1974) after “migrating” from London at age six, 20 years in a kampung in Terengganu (1974 to 1994), 15 years in Selangor (1994 to 2009), and for the last 11 years I have been back here in the UK, my country of birth (and probably will die here, but hopefully not too soon).

In short, I have lived in four different “worlds” over the last 70 years. So, I can see how different the people are in these different worlds and how their thoughts, mentality, values, etc., differ. And that is why when the 98% rural Malays became urbanised (or at least 77% of them are) they changed. And this change reflects in their voting trend.

The creation of Muafakat Nasional was the greatest thing since sliced bread. It is a case of one-plus-one equals three (1+1=3). On their own, Umno and PAS have no value. The value is in the sum of the two.

But that is still not enough. That is still only one-third, or less than half. Muafakat Nasional still needs a third or fourth component added to it. So it has to be Umno plus PAS plus something else, or Umno plus PAS plus a few something else.

And this is the direction which Umno and PAS or Muafakat Nasional (or Perikatan Nasional) need to go. Enough with all these egos! There are too many peacocks in Malaysian politics. These people imagine themselves as superheroes and keep making promises their body cannot keep. They are out of touch with reality and are living in the glory of the past.

Hang Tuah and Hang Jebat may or may not have existed. But that is all in the past. All those silat prowess and magical keris cannot win battles today. Today, all it takes is a bullet between the eyes to finish off the greatest silat master with his most sakti keris. So, get real, and stop living in the past. Today is the era of coalitions, not of sole warriors.