This is terrific! In all my years of watching the BN regime strive to maintain a balance between its twin characteristics of criminality and incompetence, I’ve never before seen it or the nation it’s been running, or rather ruining, in such a shambles.

Some, I see, blame it on the current alleged Prime Minister, Najib Abdul Razak. Or perhaps I should make that absentee Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak, considering he has deigned to turn up to about one parliamentary sitting in 10 during his tenure.

Apparently preferring to jet around the world with his shopaholic spouse and an entourage of other assorted freeloaders, only returning from time to time to make stupid, deceitful speeches on fraudulent themes like “building the world’s best democracy”, “zero tolerance of corruption” and “national unity”, plus other vital topics like the price of kangkung , sales on RM1 chickens and 10-minute boiled eggs .

Though admittedly it looks as though he intends to be in town for a while now, as he’s selectively suing Malaysiakini and a few of its editors and subscribers for making the kind of critical remarks about him that millions of the rest of us have been doing ever since he was elevated to his current eminence.

But to my mind Najib’s not entirely to blame for the monstrous mess that Malaysia is in. In fact even more responsible than Najib himself, as far as I’m concerned, are the Umno so-called ‘warlords’, or more accurately whorelords, who participated in the ‘money politics’ process that elected him president of their party, and thus prime minister, in the first place.

Choosing a person with the kind of baggage Najib was carrying from his stint as defence minister - strong suspicion if not outright common knowledge of involvement in the RM500 million Scorpene submarines ‘commission’ scandal that culminated in the murder of the interpreter in that dirty deal, Altantuya Shaariibuu, not to mention any of his lesser misdeeds - was an outrage to propriety and an insult to every Malaysian.

And many of the same Umno big-noters that were guilty of installing Najib in his ill-deserved leadership of the country have since been every bit as instrumental as he has in making the monumental mess that Malaysia finds itself in today.

In the past in times of self-inflicted turmoil, or at least for the past 15 years, Umno/BN has routinely diverted public attention from its corruption and criminal incompetence by pinning a sodomy rap on its most prominent opponent, Anwar Ibrahim.

Unprecedented panic

But he’s about to be sent back to jail again, as far as I know, and in any case Umno/BN’s role in what “acting” Transport Minister and actual Defence Minister Hishammuddin Hussein himself tirelessly advertises as the “unprecedented” loss of MAS flight MH370 has sent the powers that be into such an unprecedented panic that even more spectacular feats of diversion are called for than usual.

Thus, in its desperation, and for want of any better idea, like coming clean for a change and even going straight at least until the uproar dies down, the regime has been rallying its pack of racist and religionist prostitutes to try and perpetuate its fraudulent pose as ‘defender’ of the Islamic faith and Malay race.

As part of this project, its inspector-general of police (IGP) has refused to obey a court order requiring a Muslim father to return his non-Muslim daughter to his former wife. The Selangor Islamic Religious Council (Mais) has similarly defied a court instruction to return hundreds of Christian Bibles it long ago illegally ‘confiscated’. And of course various Umno operatives have again started denying that Malaysia is a secular state.

Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Jamil Khir Baharom ( right ) has declared that Malaysia is “not a secular state” on the grounds that there is “no provision for it in the federal constitution,” in the process citing a 2012 statement by former minister in the Prime Minister’s Department, Nazri Abdul Aziz, that ‘based on the (Supreme Court) case of Che Omar bin Che Soh, it is clear that Malaysia never decided to be a secular state.”

And Dewan Rakyat speaker Pandikar Amin Mulia has since ruled likewise , though only, he claims, for parliamentary purposes.

I’m no constitutional expert, but whether or not Malaysia is supposed to be a secular state, the ever-ruling regime has so comprehensively subverted and perverted it into some poisonous alternative entity that could aptly characterised as a sectular state. Sectarian divisionism is the order of the day, with Umno’s partisan dominance of Barisan Nasional reflected in its creation and sectarian bias in every facet of government, the civil services and Malaysian society at large.

Outright sickular

In fact the Umno/BN regime’s running or rather ruining of the country is so far from honestly and straight-forwardly secular that it would be no exaggeration whatever to call it outright sickular.

Replete as it is with stomach-churning levels of crime and injustice, ranging from such nauseating atrocities as the still ‘unsolved’ assassination of Altantuya Shaariibuu and the ‘neither murder nor suicide’ of Teoh Beng Hock at the hands of the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) to hundreds of homicides in police ‘shoot-outs’ and custody.

And when it comes to how it handles the Malaysian people’s money, the BN regime is so ultra-secular it is nothing short of suckular, so greedily do its members and cronies slurp-up countless billions of ringgit in ‘commissions’ on purchases and projects, wholesale ‘leakages’ of public funds and sheer daylight robbery, as perennially revealed by not only Malaysia’s only free news media, online portals like Malaysiakini, but by the regime’s own auditor-general’s report.

In short, the Umno/BN regime may not be convinced that the Malaysian state is secular, but appears quite content, if not outright delighted and determined to keep it self-interestedly sectular, sexular, sickular and suckular.

All of which terms, as most readers will have noted for themselves by now, contain the word ‘ular’. And highly appropriately so, considering the venomous, forked-tongued fashion in which the vipers of Umno/BN routinely ‘explain’ their serpentine moves.

As exemplified by Home Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi ( left ) during the recent Teluk Intan buy-election when he called the Chinese “ingrates” for voting for the DAP, by Shahrizat Abdul Jalil with her ridiculous claim that “BN doesn’t play racial politics ,” and by Umno’s own ‘newspaper’, Utusan Malaysia , in its declaration that “insulting Umno is tantamount to insulting Malays and Islam.”

No wonder the country is in such an unholy mess, and that those responsible for its shocking state are so hellishly afraid of what would happen to them under a secular system complete with proper separation of powers, an honest-to-God independent judiciary, free and fair elections and genuine news media. 

DEAN JOHNS, after many years in Asia, currently lives with his Malaysian-born wife and daughter in Sydney, where he coaches and mentors writers and authors and practises as a writing therapist. Published books of his columns for Malaysiakini include ‘Mad about Malaysia', ‘Even Madder about Malaysia', ‘Missing Malaysia', ‘1Malaysia.con’ and ‘Malaysia Mania’.