“Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.”

- Jean-Paul Sartre

“Sarawak is once again reduced to a chess piece in this never ending game of political domination,” an old hand tells me late one night.

Having just thrown in the towel after decades of service to the people(s) of Sarawak, this former establishment employee turned social worker, accidental political agitator turned opposition supporter and now resigned cynic, just wants to watch his grandchildren play.

He has rebuffed overtures from the opposition to campaign for them. “It would make very little difference in the end. I’m a nobody to politicians, and although some ordinary people remember that I did my best to help them, they have bigger problems to worry about,” he smiles when prodded.

He quotes an earlier article of mine from a battered notebook, “Taib (Mahmud) by far the shrewdest player in the race game in Malaysia has managed to keep Umno's grubby little hands from his sandbox all the while feathering his nest with the exploitation of the lands and natural resources at the expense of its people.

“These have made him far more than a proxy, and the way how post-tsunami 2008 he has cocked the big Umno guns from the Peninsular and benefitted from the Pakatan squabbles is a reminder of the complicated politics of East Malaysia.”

Some things never change. To Umno – no point in calling it Barisan National anymore – Sarawak and Sabah are the vote banks. To the opposition, they are game changers for federal power. The whole point of this game is to maintain or break Umno federal power in the Peninsular...