Somehow I doubt that the Sarawak state bird, the hornbill, cackles like a kookaburra. But it sure is a chuckle to see Najib Abdul Razak so horny for votes in the Sarawak elections that he is up to his customary trick of bribing the electorate on behalf of the BN regime and sticking the Malaysian people with the bill.
And even more ludicrous than Najib’s customary ‘I help you, you help me’ antics, his corrupt expenditure of public money to fund them, and the illegal co-option of police and other civil servants to campaign for the criminal clique currently running Sarawak, has been his deputy Muhyiddin Yassin’s contribution to the campaign.
In an attempt to ridicule the Pakatan Rakyat slogan calling for change, and the DAP hornbill mascot named ‘Ubah’ (Change), he delivered himself of a diatribe that came across like a self-satirising comedy routine.
“They say ‘change’,” he was quoted as declaiming, “but ‘change’ is an archaic word. The word we in BN want to use is ‘transformation’. Look at the dictionary for the word ‘transformation’; it is bigger than ‘change’. The prime minister has said that change is not sufficient enough [sic]. We must be able to transform to move the country.”
He then went on about the regime’s so-called Government Transformation Programme (GTP), Economic Transformation Programme (ETP) and Political Transformation Programme (PTP) claiming that “the government has delivered and asking “who can say the BN government has failed?”
In response to Muhyiddin’s rhetorical question, it seems fair to respond that nobody can say that the GTP, ETP and PTP have actually failed, as they’re all fake ‘initiatives’ dreamed-up to convey the false impression that BN intends to improve.
But as for the broad concept of ‘transformation’ itself, it has proven astonishingly successful thus far for the BN regime and its cronies, and extremely costly if not outright catastrophic for the people of Malaysia.
In over 50 years of unremitting and increasingly corrupt and lawless domination of the nation, BN has transformed Malaysia from a genuine democracy with an honest and honourable founding prime minister into a kleptocracy headed by a coterie of crooks and cronies.
Under the pretence of uniting and serving the interests of the people at large, and bumiputera citizens in particular, BN has relentlessly transformed its so-called New Economic Policy into a tool to enrich the ‘putras’ at the expense of ordinary ‘bumis’ and everybody else.
Simultaneously, BN has transformed the nation’s formerly able, efficient, honest and upstanding civil services into bloated, bandit-ridden mono-racial bureaucracies beholden to nobody but their political masters.
Even the Election Commission (EC) is totally hopeless and helpless to properly carry out its duties, having been transformed by BN from a watchdog on behalf of the people to a lap-dog that stands by wagging its tail while its masters get on with their gerrymandering, roll-stacking and vote-buying.
Litany of BN crimes
BN has also, especially during the 22 years of Mahathirism, transformed an originally just and independent judiciary into an instrument of political power, repression and persecution, and an international joke.
Witness the show-trials of Anwar Ibrahim and the no-trials of high-level identities implicated in the murder of Altantuya Shaariibuu and suspects in an unceasing series of corruption scandals involving hundreds of billions of ringgit.
To ensure that its economic and other crimes are as covert as possible, BN has transformed the principle of public accountability into a system of secrecy and lies through a series of anti-transparency laws.
And even more destructively, it has transformed Malaysia’s formerly free media into a cheer-squad for the regime; a public-relations machine run by sycophants and stooges prepared to systematically betray the interests and trust of their families, friends and fellow citizens.
In case some of its crimes don’t go unnoticed, BN has ensured that they will in any case go uninvestigated and unpunished by transforming the forces of law-and-order, the so-called ‘Royal’ Malaysian Police and the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission into virtual security-guards or armed goons for the government and its network of criminal connections, and apparently granted these organisations a licence to abuse and even kill small-time ‘suspects’ with impunity.
In the process of all this, BN has transformed Malaysia from an Asian ‘tiger’ like Singapore, Taiwan or South Korea into an alley-cat that’s scratching for any stray scraps of economic investment along with basket-cases like the Philippines, which has never recovered from being transformed from prosperity to penury by the BN-style Marcos regime.
And to judge from recent statistics on illicit capital outflows from Malaysia, a great many beneficiaries of the BN system are transferring their misbegotten billions overseas in the hope of transforming themselves into apparently legitimate ‘businesspersons’.
For example, Abdul ‘The Termite’ Taib Mahmud, chief minister of Sarawak for the past 30 years, has allegedly built a real-estate empire on several continents on the proceeds of his position, in the process transforming a considerable proportion of resource-rich Sarawak citizens into paupers.
In fact the least amusing sight in the state election campaign so far has reportedly been the sorry spectacle of Sarawakians fighting and scrambling around in the dirt in their desperation to get their hands on BN goodie-bags containing nothing but Tupperware and pictures of the prime minister.
For me, that pitiful scene pretty well says it all about the kind of transformation BN is capable of delivering for Malaysia and Malaysians, and why a change - any change - would be for the better.
Who knows? If Pakatan Rakyat or some other political opposition some day manages to convince enough voters to transform the nation into a BN-free zone, maybe all the cash that currently goes in corruption could be spent on finally granting workers the protection of a minimum wage.
In which event people will be able to afford to buy their own Tupperware, and never have to bear the sight of Najib’s face, or listen to Muyhiddin Yassin’s stupid jokes, ever again.
It’s not impossible. The voters of several states have already transformed themselves by scorning their BN government. And the sooner Sarawakians do likewise, the sooner the whole of Malaysia will be laughing.
DEAN JOHNS, after many years in Asia, currently lives with his Malaysian-born wife and daughter in Sydney, where he mentors creative writing groups. Already published in Kuala Lumpur is a third collection of his columns for Malaysiakini , following earlier collections ‘Mad about Malaysia’ and ‘Even Madder about Malaysia’.
