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A Nation of Ten Monarchies and Ten Thousand Republics

MALAYSIAN DISSONANCE BEGINS at the top: When the cabinet meets every Wednesday, it is not a meeting of equals under a primus inter pares, the Prime Minister, but of princely grandees, meeting as Mafia dons, on how much of their reach they are prepared to sacrifice for the common good. For the cabinet is not to run the country, but to keep the peace amongst the individual ministers. The ministries are the personal fiefdoms of the ministerial grandees. Once it is over, they carry on nevertheless, with little thought to policy or agreements, and as they would, defying the other ministerial grandees. The Prime Minister, for all his power and influence, is there to keep the peace, and little else. The collective responsibility of the cabinet under the first three post-independent prime ministers, is replaced, under the Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed, with the present system, where no minister takes responsibility for failure of policy or governance.

This dissonance spreads itself to the ministries, the states, departments, the National Front, trades unions, associations, individuals. The ministries operate as they want, with no thought to whether it conflicts with national policy or with other plans the other ministries may have. Policies and plans are made on the run, off-the-cuff when reporters ask them questions in a shopping arcade or after a meal. Parliament is ignored, there only to show the world Malaysia has one. Government procedures and commitments are cheerfully ignored, when it suits the Prime Minister, or cabinet minister. Trengganu is deprived of its oil royalties because the opposition PAS party is in power, and the National Front (BN) wants to deny it the funds so the state is forced, in the next election, to return the BN to office. Billion ringgit projects are announced, as an aside, with no discussion or even from where the money is to come from.

Government policy is cheerfully ignored, as changes are made because the officer at the desk decides to. Clerks decide if a child eligible to attend a school should be admitted or not, whatever the education ministry had decided. One brillian Indian Muslim student, accepted as a Malay, is denied a place in the special school for brilliant Malays near his home, because he did not look Malay. His father went to the education ministry, and got an order to have the boy admitted to the school. The clerk would not hear of it, and demanded to know how he could be admitted when he is not a Malay. The father lost his temper, and told her his son is as Malay as Dr Mahathir and the culture and tourism minister, Dato' Seri Kadir Sheikh Fadhir, and his son fairer than the minister. The boy was admitted only when he insisted on seeing the headmistress. This is replayed every day in government departments and offices, when the officer or clerk attending to you decides what must be done.

Malaysia's ten monarchies, a quarter of the world's kingdoms, has burst into ten thousand republics, each at odds with the other, adding to the dissonance the country is in today. Every man is a republic unto himself. A headmistress orders her girl students to wear the Malay baju kurung dress, and the boys trousers, to "instil Islamic values". If Islamic values can be instilled by dress, when then is the Malay community so dysfunctional un-Islamic practices as hedonism, rapes, incest afflicts it more the other communities? Perlis invits Malaysian Muslims to come to the state to marry second or third or fourth wives, and warns those who criticised it, especially the women, that they should shut up for "it is allowable, indeed obligatory, in specified circumstances". The federal government cannot interfere in Muslim and Islamic practices in the state. The National Front (BN) can. But it would not. The state chieftains too powerful and would, if the stakes are high enough, defy the centre.

Every one speaks out of turn, insisting it is his right. The Malay decides it is his right to keep the country pure by ridding the non-Malays, and does it any way he can. He refuses to shake your hand, if you are a non-Malay, would not eat at your table, ignore you when you have a problem, and openly calls you a kaffir. The Chinese and Indian, likewise, live in a world of their own, often not even bothered about keeping the pretence of living in a multiracial state. A Chinese firm will invariably have only Chinese workers, an Indian only Indian, a Malay, only Malay. But within each is a Mafia don in himself, deciding as he deems to do whatever he wants to do. As law and order breaks down -- and the police are a law unto themselves, more involved in the breaking of the law they are ordered to enforce -- and the citizen makes his own arrangements to live his life and cares not for any other.

Is there a standard we follow? No. Let us take just one example. Our taxi service. The official fixed rate of RM2 on flagdown, and 10 sen per 100 metres, is one of several officially fixed rates. The new Premier taxi service, of which we know nothing of, the flagdown rate is RM4. The LPG-run Renault van flags at RM4 with 40 sen per 100 metres. Taxis flag down at RM4 at the Bintang Walk, which 200 metres away, would be half that. To go to the airport, one pays between RM60 and RM90 per trip. Should you decide to take the Airport express train, the taxi you take at KL Sentral has a RM5 surcharge. There is a radio taxi service, for which you pay an extra ringgit, but often you could not get a taxi when you want it, especially if the journey is a short one. Similarly, when you bring your car to your mechanic with a problem, he fixes it and sends you on your way, charging a fair price for its work. There is now an official list of what car mechanics can charge for various services they provide, and it is treble or quadruple what is now charged.

The government often moves in to cap prices, but here it raises the cost of service rendered as deliberate policy. At the root of this is to bring the Malay into the mainstream, the argument being that they cannot compete with the more efficient non-Malay service renderers. But the cost of this is every one pays a higher price, and the benefits of competition is lost to us all. We send a clear that Malaysia recognises only inefficient businesses and industries, and those who are efficient must be penalised. And the public is made to pay higher prices.

The BN political leadership is both powerless and dysfunctional to right it, even to make the effort to do what it must. It is caught in a myriad of agendas, only one of which is an Islamic state, and over which it has lost control of. And when the instruments of the state break up similarly, as the police and the civil service already has, other dangerous trends emerge. An ongoing study in the armed forces discusses anew the lessons of the 13 May 1969 racial riots, if it could happen in 2003, and what its response would be.

Some frightening scenarios have emerged, the most serious of which is this belief that if the armed forces is called in to control the fallout, as in 1969, it should not return power to the civilians. The sane arguments of the external implications of a military government are brushed aside. What happens in that discussion, still continuing, has shocked the political establishment which, however, cannot do anything about it. And this at a time when the political leaders, including the defence minister, Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak, seriously talks of war with neighbouring Singapore. Is this possible in a dysfunctional state?

[I wrote this for my column in "Seruan Keadilan", the official organ of the Parti Keadilan Nasional, for its 21 January 2003]

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@mgg.pc.my