I can’t resist joining the chorus of scorn with which online critics responded to the recent urging by Home Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi to authors and novelists to win Malaysia its first Nobel Prize in Literature by 2057.

Like many others, I found it laughable that he seemed to be hopelessly confused between works of true Nobel-Prize-level literary excellence and the kind of best-selling ‘illiterature’ that translates into blockbuster movies or TV series.

But what struck me and many fellow observers as too ridiculous for words was his avowal that the government would always support Malaysian writers, but that “they would need to play their role first by breaking out of their cocoon mentality”.

The first time I read this I couldn’t believe my eyes. But yes, this Umno-BN goon really was blaming Malaysian writers for failing to emerge from the very cocoon that the regime of which he is a member has spent decades carefully constructing for the express purpose of stifling Malaysians’ minds and deadening their spirits.

A cocoon composed of flagrantly unconstitutional laws like the Official Secrets Act, the Printing Presses and Publications Act, the Sedition Act, and now the National Security Council Act; a system of second-class national schools and third-class universities; of deliberate sectarian divisiveness; and above all, a tissue of lies.

In short, the Umno-BN regime is such a fraud on the Malaysian people that, along with its so-called ‘mainstream’ news media, it deserves an ‘Ignoble’ Prize for fiction, and another for racial and religious friction.

Under the alleged leadership of Finance Minister and Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak, of course it also deserves a special ‘Ignoble’ Prize for ‘wreckonomics’, as Najib’s squandering of the nation’s resources on such scams as 1MDB, a RM2.6-billion alleged ‘donation’ and an obscenely-bloated civil service, not to mention personal jet-setting, shopping and other perks, puts even some of the scandals under the premiership of former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad in the shade.

Thus, far from a Nobel Prize in literature or indeed any other field of achievement by 2057 or any other time safely in the far future, what Malaysia desperately needs right now, this minute, is a ‘No-bull’ Prize.

A false and patronising proposition

No more Umno-BN bull about some kind of ‘struggle’ it so laughably claims to be engaged in to defend royalty, race and religion, as these alleged ‘pillars’ are nothing but pillows for the powers that be.

No more bull the likes of pretending that Malaysians must be ‘protected’ from news of corruptions, plunders and blunders by members of the regime for the purpose of maintaining public peace, social harmony or some fantasy like ‘1Malaysia’.

No more bull about ‘the world’s best democracy’, ‘zero tolerance for corruption’, ‘a moderate Muslim democracy’ or ‘election integrity’ pledges.

And perhaps most of all, no more bull suggesting that Malaysians should respond to the woeful state into which Umno-BN corruption, theft and incompetence have reduced the ‘wreckonomy’ by shopping for cheaper kangkung and RM1 chickens , working two jobs and buying second-hand goods.

In fact, come to think of it, the perpetrators of this dire state of economic affairs should by right be made to pay for it, in cash or imprisonment or both, and the majority of voters who tried to achieve this result in the 2013 general election be awarded the ‘No-bull’ Prize.

To get back to the Nobel, however, the final point I feel impelled to make about Ahmad Zahid Hamidi’s false and patronising proposition that Malaysians can ever win one only by breaking out of their “cocoon mentality”, is that when a Malaysian does thus break out, Zahid and the gang rush to nobble him.

Witness their hitting of globally-awarded, if admittedly not yet Nobel Prize-winning, cartoonist Zunar with so many sedition charges as to threaten him with over 40 years’ jail .

And in any case, who does Zahid think he is to be talking about literature? As far as I’m aware, all he is publicly known to have written himself is a letter to the FBI requesting the dropping of illegal gambling charges against Umno-BN crony Paul Phua.

So before he talks literature again, perhaps he should actually read some. Starting, perhaps, with two of the great Fyodor Dostoevsky’s famous works, ‘The Gambler’ and ‘Crime and Punishment’.

Of course neither book won Dostoevsky a Nobel Prize for Literature, as the honour wasn’t instituted until 1901. But both should give Zahid and his regime accomplices a good deal to think about while they wait for a Malaysian writer, or better yet all Malaysians, to break out of the Umno-BN cocoon.

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’.