Tag: corruption

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Politics & government

[2973] Harapan must not let Pakatan pussies speak for the coalition

We all understand why Pakatan Harapan needed to ally with Barisan Nasional. At the very end of the last political cycle, we were faced with stark choices: have an imperfect alliance between the reform-minded individuals and everything the grand old party presents, or live under an incompetent conservative regime that would rewrite what Malaysia would mean so completely. Given the world as it was at that particular point of that, the imperfect alliance was the preferred option.

Such imperfect alliance will always present Pakatan members and supporters with challenges. Compromises will have to be made and that is completely understandable and reasonable.

But not all things can be compromised, and compromises must involve both sides, not just one. If only one side compromises, and willing to compromise everything, then something is wrong.

That is where some Pakatan members and supporters are today.

Whenever new political appointments were made for the benefits of Umno, some Pakatan supporters would use the imperfect alliance as an excuse. “This is not a Pakatan government. It is a unity government.”

Now, there is movement to get Najib Razak, barely several months in prison, pardoned. Disappointingly, some Pakatan supporters now use the same template excuse without even thinking what it means. Too eager to defend the Pakatan government against any criticism, the template is used as get out of jail card for every single problem the government faces. They do not even bother to right the wrong. So fearful of any threat of instability to the government, they lose their backbone. They bend over without making any effort to push back.

Those are who I call Pakatan pussies. No backbone. No accountability.

These spineless pussies, when faced with difficult questions from Pakatan supporters, would go back to their list of lazy excuses and say “do you want a Pas government, or Pakatan? Choose.”

Betting chips down when they are not

The stark choices Malaysians collectively, and Pakatan supporters specifically, faced in November 2022 came to being when the chips were down. It was the nuclear option at the very end of the road.

We needed the nuclear option to sharpen the mind of many. “Pas or Pakatan” was a simple decision tree to let people discover for themselves the consequences of November choices. Veil of ignorance, so-to-speak. You present the many with the destinations, and make them work for themselves the roads towards the preferred destination. These allowed them to see the world as it was, and accept the decision made, however unpalatable the road was.

We are no longer in November 2022. The pressures are much less intense. The timeline is easier. In fact, attempts to get Najib Razak pardoned have not even started earnestly.

Yet, these Pakatan pussies are inappropriately using the nuclear option, betting the chips down too soon.

Red lines

Pardoning Najib Razak, in my mind, is a red line in any compromise between Pakatan and Barisan. I have at least three reasons why that is so.

One, he and his supporters have not expressed any remorse. In a society where corruption is still rampart, example must be set so we can begin to reset our morals. To free an unremorseful man is the wrong message to send in pursuit of a moral society.

Two, it opens Pakatan Harapan to partisan attacks from Pas and their allies. So far, Perikatan Nasional, Bersatu especially, appeared have been crippled. They are now in search of an issue to rejuvenate their political fortune. They have tried to make EPF withdrawals as a rallying point. They have not been successful there. Pakatan Harapan seemingly blessing the pardon—does not matter explicitly or implicitly—will be the one point Perikatan needs. Pas (and Umno) did that with ICERD and the death of  Muhammad Adib Mohd Kassim, and came back from the dead in 2019.

Three, the long run is not as static as many make it out to be. In November 2022 when decisions had to be made in a matter of days if not weeks, the decision tree in which the nuclear option was represented was static. This is especially so when election had been concluded. It is a mistake to think the same statics will work over longer time horizon. People… voters… adapt to situations. If you keep using the nuclear options too many times, then people will begin to dismiss it and become immune to any similar exhortation. Additionally, it is quite easy to imagine more and more parties entering the arena competing for Pakatan’s base as a sign of dissatisfaction. At the very least, non-voting will be an issue. This has happened before not too long ago. In other words, in the long term, there is a real risk of current Pakatan voters deserting the coalition.

The final point is not a mere theoretical musing. In 2009 until 2013 when Najib was busy promoting various liberalization that he appeared to be a liberal, his men and women dismissed concerns about Umno’s voting base. “They would have no where to go.” That was quickly proven untrue in 2013, which partially led Najib to turn around and embraced racist politics more rabidly.

Message: do not take your voting base for granted.

Get a backbone and push back

Compromises have to be made. But there have to be red lines. Pardoning Najib is one of those red lines. Pardoning Najib risks the long-term viability of Pakatan Harapan, and we need Pakatan Harapan to succeed in order to push back racist and fascist forces.

Pakatan needs to push back. We need to tell Umno we will not support any pardoning, and in fact, opposes it. We can make it difficult, and raise the cost of them doing so.

And please, no kop-out by saying it is a royal prerogative. In so many ways, the royals are accountable to the people too. Rakyat itu Raja.

At the end of the day, Pakatan Harapan will have our urban fortresses. Right now, it is Umno that faces annihilation with Bersatu and Pas outside having the grand old party for lunch. It is Umno that faces existential crisis, not Pakatan. Remember, that crisis is Najib’s own doing. Too many in Umno are too blind to see what outsiders already know. Here, Pakatan needs to advise Umno the folly they are committing.

If the stubbornness continues, Pakatan needs to be careful so we do not sink with Umno.

This is why we need to push back.

And this is why Pakatan Harapan cannot let these Pakatan pussies speak for Pakatan. Not only they are spineless, they are myopic too.

Categories
Personal Politics & government Society

[2956] Why does sending Najib to prison feel so empty so soon?

As an 18-year-old a lifetime ago, I thought Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia was the end of it. The ending. Not quite death of course, but the emphasis placed on the national examination was so great that it felt like a be-all and end-all. A terminal. Yes, there was life afterward, but that exam determined everything. Do well, and you would get to go to a good school (if you are really lucky, then you would get to go to a really great school across oceans) with some kind of scholarship. Do badly, you would be destined to mediocrity.

I did well, but I quickly learned SPM was not the last station. I went to a good school with scholarship and all, but it was not smooth sailing. University life was hard, even as I was privileged to have experienced it. I learned I was wrong, and I learned something new: life is a series of challenges. A celebration might be appropriate for surmounting each challenge, but there will always be another barrier, sooner or later.

I learned it the physical way when I unwisely went on a major hiking trip to Yosemite during my junior year. Ill-prepared, I came down the Tuolumne Canyon, all the way down to the river at the bottom to soak my feet in cool flowing mountain water. It was a long canyon 20, 30, 40 miles in length, with rugged terrain, high cliff on both sides, and the Milky Way bright up in the sky. No artificial light, no vehicle, no phone reception. The destination was upriver. Each climb to a local peak only revealed a steeper trail beyond. It was a cascade of falls that seemed to never end. If ever I entertained of idea of suicide seriously, it was there. I wanted to give up and jump down. The fatigue was too much. It felt hopeless. But somehow, I made it, with assistance of two strangers near the very top. After a hearty meal, I zoomed to Los Angeles and returned to Ann Arbor to spend my summer more banally by waking up late and play computer games all the time, inter-spaced with anime-watching and soccer games, while waiting download of large files to complete.

The jailing of Najib Razak feels a little bit like SPM, or one of those falls in that Tuolumne cascade. It was a journey of roughly 10 years, which, a huge chunk of it spent in despair and hopelessness. My little part in the whole saga seemed meaningless. The 2018 election came, and there was euphoria, but hopes were dashed soon enough. It was a miracle Najib was found guilty four years later, and his appeal dismissed. And let us not kid ourselves, he could have escaped his deserved fate if he had pushed the political button harder. Government fell twice, partly because of Najib, and Zahid, who were desperate to outsmart the system.

But the day after, life feels empty. There is a slight hopefulness, but that is it. I take it as a reminder that life is a series of cascades. A series of challenges.

The system works this time, but only because we worked to make it work, and then be let to work. There are too many times when the system has been made to succumb to corruption. Never forget that. Institutions are not automatic machines. It has to be manned (and womanned?) by good people. And Najib still has his avenues to escape his punishment.

And it is not just him who is corrupt. His collaborators are still out there, corrupting our society still.

The long struggle is the reason why, the victory yesterday, feels hollow so soon. There is still a long way to go, mountains to scale.

Categories
Liberty Politics & government Society

[2950] Too tame for our own good

Many things could describe the past two separate years that merged into one. Here, I would describe it as the taming of our society. The fire that powered many before was doused by shocks and disappointments of February 2020 along with all the political development that followed. This broke the heart of many.

And if there were still beating heart fighting on the political front, the pandemic that flared up soon after broke the body of many. The crisis and its mismanagement brought debilitating economic effects that forced many to switch attention away politics (politics here is not the narrowly defined partisan-party politics, but one about governance and the overall organization of society) to that of personal livelihood. Many died along the way.

Malaysian society as it was before the pandemic was mostly too polite for our own good, but the bludgeons needed to fight the pandemic turned that politeness into utter submission. There were noise and protests against the manner government regulation was applied incompetently. Some went to the streets. But those noise and protests were nothing compared to the years before. During the pandemic, far too few could, or willing to go to the ground, divided out of fear of getting infected, or the need to work at a time when unemployment was soaring, furloughing was the talks of the town, and wages were cut down significantly.

The foundation which the Muhyiddin government stood on was shaky soon after its undemocratic formation, but it stood for so long because any anger was contained by fear, or deference of power. But the ember-like anger burnt further and when it appeared a fire was about to lit—even patience among the polite has its limits—the irresponsible government played poker: they raised the stakes by declaring emergency. The stakes were raised to the point the polite did not dare challenge it too fiercely. Or they were too tired, and hapless.

The subsequent government under Ismail Sabri lowered the temperature for a while but the incompetence remained. That same incompetence was for all to see during the recent great floods across the peninsula. The further loss of life and property raised the political temperature yet again. The politics of race and religion showed it was all meaningless in the face of incompetence, so much so that this administration that largely has the same Cabinet members who previously prided itself as a Malay-Muslim government, has stopped marketing itself as one.

Amid the troubles faced by the general public, yet another scandal is erupting in the public first involving the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission, and as national crisis tends to pull other public institutions into the ditch (1MDB was one such case but on a grander scale), later the Securities Commission. A good institutional set-up would have contained it. This government prefers to drag everything down, for their benefits, at the expense of the country. All that highlights how institutional reforms achieved due to the 2018 General Election was fragile and needed nurturing, and how the events of February 2020 undid the good work. The message before had always been reforms took time, but few imagined there would be so big a digression happening so soon.

The digression is happening because we have been too polite, too tame amid assaults over our democratic institutions. It is time to be not so tame and fight.

I would like to end this post by reproducing Usman Awang’s Sepatah Kata:

Sebuah perkataan yang paling ditakuti
Yang tradisional sekali
Untuk bangsa kita yang pemalu.
Sekarang kata ini kuajarkan pada anakku:
Kau harus jadi manusia kurangajar
Untuk tidak mewarisi malu ayahmu.
Lihat petani-petani yang kurangajar
Memiliki tanah dengan caranya
Sebelumnya mereka tak punya apa
Kerana ajaran malu dari bangsanya.
Suatu bangsa tidak menjadi besar
Tanpa memiliki sifat kurangajar.

Categories
Economics Politics & government

[2890] Second best solutions, democratic compromises and reforms

I do have strong policy preference, and that preference originates from my ideological leanings. But the preference only sets the default position, or more accurately, the initial stance. I am willing to be swayed by data and models but then again, over the years, I have learned data and models can be bent so much even with the best assumptions, it can be interpreted in various ways that make the numbers never quite as objective as it is made out to be. In the end, it is the context of the numbers that is important, not the numbers themselves. Numbers alone can be meaningless in social science, and economics.

I have become less ideological over the years, especially after the 2008 global financial crisis, and my policy preference is driven more and more by empirics. But after a year in the public sector, I find my preference has not quite been assaulted by empirical results. Rather, it has been a lesson on compromise and second or even third-best solutions.

Second-best solution is arrived at when the ideal solution is not possible given some constraints. The best solution is technically possible in the sense that it is technologically or economically possible. However, the challenges from the political or social aspects make it difficult to achieve fully.

For instance, I prefer to have the ECRL be cancelled outright. It does not seem very economically viable, and there are cheaper ways to encourage connectivity across the country while developing the areas outside of the peninsular economic centers. But the need to be careful with China, especially at a time when the global economy is at risk of heightened protectionism with Malaysia dragged into an unwanted trade dispute, means my policy preference is out of reach.

And it is not merely a theoretical concern. After all, China did employ unfair trade practices on the Philippines just to punish the latter over totally unrelated issues involving the overlapping claims in the Spratlys and the Paracels several years back. China can be a big bully, as any big power can be, and Malaysia being a small open economy should not test that proposition by too much. We have been successful in pushing for our case with China, but one has to wonder where is that line that we should not cross.

That is one example of having to land on a second-best solution, with an external consideration.

But more often than not, the challenges are internal in nature.

In a democracy where consensus is absent, the available solutions are frequently second best. There are so many stakeholders to take care, making compromises a must.

Just today, a senior civil servant asked how do I feel about working in the public sector, and how does it compare against the private sector. I answered that professionally, working in the public sector was tougher than in the private sector. In the former, there were so many parties to manage and to satisfy, whereas in the private sector, one could doggedly pursue an agenda, or even bulldozed it all the way through. In a way, achieving the ideal solution is easier outside of government than inside of it.

However, that does not mean the public sector is redundant. Many things do require the public sector to work and cannot be done through the private sector alone. It is the reality of a non-anarchist world, which is true almost everywhere in this world.

This can be linked back to the manifesto of Pakatan Harapan.

The Institute for Democracy and Economics Affairs, a think tank I somewhat have a relation with, today criticized the government for being overambitious with its election manifesto, and for the government’s weak resolve in delivering its promises.[1]

I would say that the manifesto is an example of the ideal solution, and the current situation is a second-best solution.

And this does not yet account for the fact that even the manifesto is a work of compromise, and that a manifesto as an ideal is supposed to be bold (in a good way, not the Brexit shambolic way). Furthermore, many supporters of the government work on having reasonable compromise. I for one is not 100% in agreement with the manifesto. But the urgent need for reforms after years of proliferating brazen grand corruption meant compromise had to be made to achieve a goal of cleaning the country. Second-best solution was what we had, because the ideal was not achievable.

Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reservedHafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reservedHafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved

But coming back to the criticism leveled by the think tank on the government lacking sufficient resolve to deliver institutional reforms, I think I can come out and say such reforms are still coming and it is not clear whether on its own context that it would be demoted from the ideal to the second best solution. Besides, it is not as if there was no reform at all. All too often, people forget the significant reforms that are already staring them in the eyes, be it the separation of powers between the prime minister and the finance minister, wider application of open tender, greater transparency and freer media.

There are challenges even in the areas I have cited where reforms have happened. But wide-ranging reforms require time, especially in a robust democracy. Mock the line all you want, but you know it is true.

The important thing is that, we must persist. Democracy simply does not end at the ballot box. It is more than just going out to vote. A fancy deck does not a reform make, too.

Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reservedHafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reservedHafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved

[1] — The government has set a list of unrealistic goals and showcased a lack political will to fulfil other achievable promises made in the Buku Harapan GE14 election manifesto, according to the Institute of Democracy and Economic Affairs (Ideas). Ideas research director Laurence Todd (photo, above) said the think-tank’s ongoing Projek Pantau monitoring of 244 selected sub-promises found little progress made to about 30 percent of the “unrealistic goals” set in areas of education, institutional reforms and the economy. [Alyaa Alhadjri. Report card on Harapan shows ‘unrealistic goals’ in manifesto. Malaysiakini. June 28 2019]

Categories
Photography Politics & government

[2840] Bersih 5, ticked

This edition of Bersih, felt less carnival-like unlike last year. Nevertheless, Bangsar still had the fun crowd, with all the banners and masks and flags and songs. I love the fight songs.

But well, the protest is not about having fun. It is about exercising political rights. And it is never really courageous to take potshots from the sides. From time to time, we hafta go down.

I had expected the worst, after all the heightened provocations and shrilling threats made by Umno men. I was prepared with salt water, some medication and legal aid contact written on a piece of paper in my bag. In the end, it proved to be unnecessary thanks to the protest organizers and the police. I m thankful in the end, the protest was peaceful.

I am glad we have learned something about right to peacefully assemble after all these years. That took a lot of work. And that alone is progress, and that should be restated time and time again to the cynics.

There are various persons currently being held by the police for merely protesting peacefully. Whatever progress we have achieved, there is still much to be done. After all, Najib Razak is still the Prime Minister, after all the wrongs he has done.

Bersih 5 on Jalan Bangsar

How was it in Bangsar?

Well, from left to right, Riza Aziz, Rosmah Mansur (obscured), Jho Taek Low and the man himself, Najib Razak.