Selangor Senator Dr Syed Husin Ali has brought up the question of whether the government’s crises of recent times are the result of rank amateurishness, or something more sinister than stupidity.

In a wide-ranging speech earlier this week on the Royal Address, the second-term member of Parliament’s Upper House alighted on this question after a forensic analysis of the government’s handling of the disappearance of Flight MH370.

“The question (on the matter of the government’s confused handling} arises: Is it due to incompetence or is the government trying to hide something?” queried the senator.

In Syed Husin’s sifting of the evidence that has become public knowledge as a result of direct government revelation or through inadvertent disclosure by its underlings, the balance of probabilities is weighted in favour of the latter conclusion.

Also, calculation more than caprice, argued the former deputy president of PKT in his speech, was at the heart of the government’s handling of the Sodomy II against opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, another issue the senator delved in painstaking detail.

Marshalling recondite details such as the alleged sodomy victim Saiful Bhukari’s  ( on the lef t) pre-accusation meetings with Umno top guns and a supposedly conniving cop, with appellate judge Balia Yusof’s telling refusal to look at Anwar while pronouncing the guilty verdict on him, Syed Husin drew up a damning indictment of the criminal justice system, which he said mocked Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak’s much-trumpeted aim of making Malaysia the “best democracy.”

'All state institutions emasculated'

He claimed that practically all institutions of state - from the press, to the judiciary, and the police force - that exist for the proper ordering of the rule of law and democracy, have been “emasculated if not annihilated.”

Syed Husin said the government laboured under the illusion that democracy was about going through the motions of holding elections once every five years; more importantly, he said, democracy was about the  conduct of “elections and debates in Parliament freely”.

He said it was also about allowing for the growth of a free press and the promotion of judges within the judiciary whose independence and capacity for impartial interpretation of the law are exemplary. 

On education, Syed Husin said the government was groping in the dark, wavering between expedient half-measures and the hallowed principles of educating the young for employment in the workplace and for civic participation in a democracy.

He said that on health, the government lacked focus on what was mandatory of any government worth its salt - the promotion of the health of the ordinary citizen at reasonable cost.

He said long queues and rising costs of medicine added to the burdens of those who happened to be sick among the lower income group.

“A government that uses inflation as a yardstick for determining the cost of drugs is alive to the interests of local and foreign capitalists and blind to the sufferings of the indigent sick,” decried Syed Husin.

The senator’s speech has to be read in all its depth and intensity, if only for a purview of what the emphases would be under a Pakatan Rakyat-run Putrajaya.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for four decades now. He likes the profession because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them.