In recent years, the official media in Malaysia has been devoting much zealous attention to the question of how some non-governmental organisations, alternative media and other independent civil society groups are funded, as if the official media always pay their journalists for the many trips to Washington DC, New York, London, Canberra, Melbourne, Manila, Bangkok or Jakarta to attend seminars, conferences, courses and workshops.
Inspired, backed or encouraged by ruling politicians such as Umno president and Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad to investigate or condemn the sources of funding of some NGOs, alternative media and other civil society independent groups, the official media has also conveniently — or selectively forgotten, to put it mildly — the larger (and more problematic) question of who funds Umno, MCA and other component parties in Barisan Nasional.
Do we honestly believe that Umno, MCA and other ruling parties operate solely on the membership fees collected? Who pays for their administrative, organisational and campaign personnel and machineries?
To many leaders, members and supporters of the opposition parties, as well as many sceptical and even cynical voters, the answer is almost self-evident. Older generations of Chinese Malaysians, for example, remember how MCA obtained a licence from the British in 1949 to run a lottery to raise political fund and recruit members.
After the gambling licence was withdrawn in 1953, MCA has been successively setting up a gamut of business enterprises like Multipurpose Cooperative (M) Ltd (1968), Multi-Purpose Holding Bhd (1975) and Huaren Holdings Sdn Bhd to generate more 'honourable' or 'moral' funds for its political activities.
Huaren which owns the English daily, The Star , became publicly controversial last year when it acquired two Chinese dailies amid widespread public protest.
Business failures
Many Chinese Malaysians in their 40s or above also remember the sufferings, both financial and psychological, caused by the failures of MCA businesses in the late 1980s, and how their 'economic saviours' were suddenly arrested, charged for fraud, misappropriation and criminal breach of trust, and subsequently convicted and jailed.
Popular memories, by nature, are always incomplete, scattered and incoherent. In an age of information explosion as well as confusion, unprocessed or unstructured memories, however morally and intellectually instructive, are often under-valued.
Fortunately, a patient and meticulous political economist, Edmund Terence Gomez, has been devoting his academic career as well as intellectual vocation for the past 15 years or so to collect and collate detailed information on the ups and downs of the political businesses and enterprises of Umno and MCA, and process and structure the otherwise unintelligible mass of corporate and political details into coherent theories, or what journalists term as 'stories'.
In his latest article, 'Political business in Malaysia: party factionalism, corporate development and economic crisis', Gomez has articulated his studies of the political businesses and funding of ruling parties in Malaysia, within the highly contemporary and relevant frameworks of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis and the 1998 Anwar Ibrahim saga.