MALAYSIANS are a good audience. We enjoy theatre, dance and comedy. We were presented with an entire package, during our intermittent lockdown, in the last 18 months.
The first show was about the politicians’ waltz.
We watched a full arena of politicians dancing the waltz with commitment towards their partners. In a flash, they switched partners and continued the dance with someone else. If they got a foothold, they left the partner dancing alone, with an illusion that no one left the arena.
The foothold that attracted them is a cluster of power brokers who had started a new show of their own – pretending that their previous show did not make it to the box office, or that it got only bad reviews.
The new show is actually a popular power play, the wayang kulit, or shadow play, which has had many reruns in Malaysia. Here, one puppet master manipulates the strings of the puppets, while enticing the fence-sitters to hop over to his side.
Politics is no laughing matter. It is disheartening to see politicians manipulating the Covid-19 crisis to sneak back in when people are dying because they are not getting oxygen in time.
Images of their greed and corruption are still raw in our mind.
There were millions and millions of us who voted out those politicians in a peaceful demonstration, and had a landslide victory for change over corruption. Now, here we are again facing a mockery of our intelligence, our principles, and most of all, our democratic right.
Why is there such hurry for a small cluster of people, with tainted hands and vested interests, to shape our future and our destiny?
When it is safe, we, the rakyat, will go to the ballot box and decide who the next leaders are. We will choose real leaders who seized the moment during the pandemic to touch our pulse during a crisis.
If we are not given a chance to exercise this right, there will be no end to these shows. Come September, the musical dance for chairs will begin and continue while the participants bargain for the best offers.
If our representatives have a moral conscience, they should look after their own fragile constituents amid the Covid-19 spread – look for the unvaccinated and help them get their jabs. Every MP is handsomely paid for this job.
In any case, since the game show has begun, let us relook our choices.
Will it be the puppet masters, who put Malaysian leaders in the spotlight for scandals so spectacular, that they intrigued the world? There have been books, talk shows and documentaries on these scandals. It was a global shame for Malaysia.
We did overthrow this group in May 2018, electing Pakatan Harapan, an “Alliance of Hope”. We celebrated changing history.
Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, who endorsed this hope for us, resigned within two years.
It is not easy to be the leader of an alliance of parties with differing ideologies. Some components, who had been in the opposition for decades, remained angry towards the previous government. They changed policies that were working well at the expense of ordinary people – for the sake of change.
Once again, the parties fragmented even further, principles were blurred, and political allies turned against one another. Loyalty was compromised.
No matter who was sworn in as prime minister at the time, he would have been condemned by others just waiting for such an opportunity.
It was a time of a global pandemic, where the whole world had little trust in government management. Out of Malaysian kindness, we decided to vaccinate every adult in the country, including our marginalised, the unrecorded, and the “invisible” migrant workers, because we care.
Let us look at Malaysia in the best possible light.
We are a blessed nation with productive agricultural land, rivers from which to fish, and a conducive environment to breed livestock. We have resourceful human labour waiting to be employed with new skill sets.
What really mattered during this pandemic was how parts of the government machinery were not working at full capacity.
With acute sharpness, let us look at which ministry is doing its work, and which is not. If we open those doors, there will be secret places where flaws have existed for decades. It is doubtful that these flaws would have been fixed during the pandemic.
It is agreed that systems are intertwined with governments, which are headed by politicians chosen on the grounds of political party quotas, not merit. Many are clueless and ill prepared to take over the scope of work of a minister.
Nonetheless, the system did not collapse in the last 18 months. It started to disintegrate decades ago, when precedent governments compromised meritocracy for quotas, the glass ceiling, nepotism and cronyism.
We cannot change a prime minister again overnight without major consequences. Malaysia will not draw investments because no one will put money in a country where there is political instability.
Real change will happen when meritocracy is restored in every institution. It should happen in Parliament, whose members are chosen for their merit, integrity and genuine commitment to the people.
Seeing the level of debate in the last Parliament meeting, it does not matter to us if Parliament is open or closed. – The Vibes, August 13, 2021
Vasanthi Ramachandran is an author and columnist, and runs the Helping Hands NGO
