COMMENT | The operative word is “mess”, the troubles the country is in.

The crown prince of Johor disdains indirection, the mode of Malay political discourse, preferring to tell it like it is.

The state of the nation may just be that it needs the drastic remedy that the prince counsels.

Tunku Ismail Sultan Ibrahim's latest broadside on the state of the nation comes a little over a week after the Conference of Rulers conveyed their concern that things are beginning to fall apart and that they were not going be like Nero, fiddling while Rome burns.

Tunku Ismail intimates he would want to do a whole lot more than just publicly convey concern like the rulers have done over the state of the nation and the suppurating wound that lies on the body politic the way the scandal-plagued 1MDB issue has.

He says he would like to disassociate the royal household of Johor from any responsibility for the parlous state of the nation and if that was not clear he, as the heir apparent to the Johor throne, would want to look at the fine print of the state's accession to the federation that had brought about the country.

And he says that if he finds any breach of the articles of accession, he would take a good look at the remedial options available.

So be it, avers the crown prince, if secession is the way out for Johor from the dire state of affairs in the wider federation.

This kind of talk is 'red meat' to the tape recorder and notebook crowd, the sort of tough talk that makes for media headlines and top stories.

In the current context of mounting concern over the effects the 1MDB issue is having on the economy where the ringgit continues to slide and the cost of living rises because of the weakness of currency and the overhang of huge debt, people are apt to sit up and listen when someone of the stature of Tunku Ismail says what he says.

There will be critics who would dismiss such talk as the rants of someone for whom talk can be rash from someone who is not saddled with the responsibility that comes with stewardship for national affairs.

Particularly so, if in this instance, the speaker says things like he is an admirer of Fidel Castro, the communist who has ruled Cuba from 1959 and after falling ill, turned the reins over to his brother Raul, in an imitation of the hereditary rule of monarchs within a system that has no respect for monarchy.

Lincoln-esque in tone

Perhaps Tunku Ismail could have done better with his choice of role model by picking Abraham Lincoln rather the elder Castro.

Certainly, Tunku Ismail's rhetoric is Lincoln-esque in tone. The man Americans revere as the 'Great Emancipator' invoked rhetoric not unlike Tunku Ismail's in the latter's warnings about the state of Malaysia's current affairs.

Consider what the US president said when faced with the threat of secession by the southern states from the America union:

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new we must think anew and act anew.”

Elsewhere in the same message to the American people in 1862, Lincoln goes on to tell his people that they must “disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country”.

Tunku Ismail is presently saying something on the order of what Lincoln said during the time when he battled to save his country from disintegration.

True, this comparison is risky in that Tunku Ismail is raising the spectre of Johor's secession whereas Lincoln was fighting precisely this threat by the southern slaveholding states of the American union when he resorted to rhetoric that resonates with Tunku Ismail's current invocations.

'Secession' is a charged term, possessing a voltage that makes citizens sit up and take notice.

Such invocations are at times necessary for people to disenthrall themselves, as Lincoln urged, when a polity is faced with national peril.

But for some imprecision in his selection of a role model, Tunku Ismail has got things spot-on in his reactions to the state of the nation and in his conception of where his responsibility lies in safeguarding his state.

Bravo Tunku!

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others.