Meltdown of the MMMs

No, the MMM is not the KKK, I repeat, not the KKK. People have already got into a mess for making analogies such as these and I don’t want Aliran Monthly to make the same faux pas on my account. God forbid! The MMMs refer strictly to Malay Muslim Males. Now, since the end of the NEP and the start of the NDP, and particularly since the financial crisis of 1997, I would say there has been a real meltdown of this species of Malaysians.

It’s sad but true, Anwar Ibrahim was the first victim. But his falling from grace brought a string of disasters on other MMMs. Rahim Nor, the erstwhile IGP, has all but disappeared from the scene and so has Daim Zainuddin, who, Anwar named as a mastermind behind his misfortune. And, while many may not know this, Mochtar Abdullah, the former A-G and subsequently judge, the chief person behind Anwar’s prosecution, has been in a coma for months. Not entirely unconnected to the Anwar episode, but Kelantan politicians Annuar Musa and Mustafa Mohamad, after losing in the 1999 election, have all but disappeared into the woodwork.

On the economic side, the falling from grace of MMMs has been conspicuous, Tajuddin Ramli and Halim Saad, to name two prominent examples. And there will be scores or even hundreds more who can be added to the list if we care to read the bankruptcy notices since 1997.

If we throw in journalists, we have two curious examples. Writer and columnist Rehman Rashid lost his job in the New Straits Times when by his own admission he was sacked for refusing to write a speech for his boss Abdullah Ahmad. Rehman, for all his brilliance and independence of mind, chose to dally with the most pro-government English daily of the country and even accept a work contract which included the duty of speech writing.

The other example is political scientist and Malaysiakini columnist Farish Noor, who declared dramatically that he was writing his last column for the web paper Malaysiakini recently. Farish intimated that he had lost the stomach to confront the stinging critics of his writings, especially when such detractors, in his view, constantly misinterpreted him or never even read what he had written before critiquing him. In particular he was attacked unfairly for his alleged anti-reformasi views, he claimed.

And well, there’s that biggest MMM meltdown of all – the resignation of Dr. Mahathir himself. And what’s my grand theory behind all of this? Elementary, my dear readers, the Anwar factor, of course!

It was Anwar’s fall from grace that begot all the others. Some more directly than others – just think! However, let me just try to validate my thesis by taking up the last mentioned fallen MMM case. Mahathir would never have decided to step down had it not been for the poor showing of UMNO in the 1999 election, which gave PAS the leadership of the opposition, added another state to its stable (Terengannu) and deprived UMNO of a two-third majority in another (Kedah). Would this have happened without the Anwar episode affecting the election? Case closed.

The Malaysian meltdown doesn’t stop at the MMM’s – it has a spillover effects on the CMMs, Chinese Motley Males or Chinese Moneyed Males, take your pick! Once the Chinese opera ended, fact became stranger than fiction and we do have something of a China syndrome occurring in the MCA. President Ling Liong Sik announces his resignation and takes out strongman of Team B Deputy leader Lim Ah Lek with him and the fallout eliminates the ‘affable’ and senior gentleman Chua Jui Meng, too. The ‘young turks’ (or spring chickens?) have really taken over! The new Team A –Team B combination of Ong Ka Ting and Chan Kong Choy, barely babies at late forties, have won the day.

But the MIC did it the Samy-way. There was virtually no contest. All of the president’s men made it save for one woman, an ‘independent’, who foiled the clean sweep and slipped into the rarified high council of patriarchs.

Goats for the Hustings

And it looks like a general election must be along the way quite soon. The signs are everywhere. Parties sorting out their problems, the injection of an RM8 billion economic stimulus package into the sagging economy, the release of ISA detainees, etc. etc. But more than anything else, that sleepy (or sleeping!) institution called the Election Commission (EC) has come alive and is now very much in the news. The constituency election exercise seems all sewn up. Predictably, no new seats are bound for the states of Kelantan and Tereggannu – no prizes for second guessing the EC here! But many more mixed seats are in the offing since the BN did so famously in such seats in the last election.

The 74-billion dollar question remains how the Malays will vote. The Indians are in the pocket, the Chinese will likely be swayed by the highest bidder, the Sabah Bumis are well and truly in the BN ‘vote bank’ and while the Sarawak Bumis are still haggling for this and that, they should be ripe for the picking come election time. With some 215 parlimentary constituencies and literally hundreds of state wards up for grabs, where are we going to find the candidates?

In the halcyon days of BN rule, the joke went that you could put up a goat with a BN logo to stand for elections and it would win. But surely we like to think that Malaysian voters are more discerning these days. They gave some 44% of the votes to the opposition the last time around in 1999. Some 680, 000 young voters were denied the vote because the EC said they were not on the cleaned-up list. Now these new voters would swell to well over one million.

Hmmm… would our young ones fall for voting goats for parliament, I wonder? We do have quite enough goats there already and that could be a good reason not to add more to the circus. But then again, my animal rights friends will say I’m insulting the ruminant species. If only some of our current YBs could learn to chew longer on legislation presented to them in parliament…. hell, we could expect a goat to at least not swallow the whole thing!!

Lessons in Polygamous Love

Which brings me to a newly refurbished piece of legislation called polygamy. But before one says anything else, polygamy is truly a perversion of humanity’s high propensity to love another person, if we recall the Bard’s line, “How many ways shall I love thee, let me count the ways.” How unpoetic and unromantic to say, instead, “How shall I love you equally, let me count my other wives!” Let me hasten to add that polygamy exists in many cultures and long before Islam came on the scene. To cite the unassailable statement of the Coalition on Women’s Rights in Islam:

The Coalition argues that monogamy should be the norm for marriage in Islam and that this is not a radical call for reform, but an assertion of a long tradition in Islam that promotes monogamy and only permits polygamy in very exceptional circumstances. It is interesting to note that Tunisia, a Muslim country, has actually taken the bold step to outlaw polygamy on the grounds that based on the Islamic injunction, it is impossible in this day and age for a man to deal justly with more than one wife.

Hence, I read with some trepidation the report in a local daily that a polygamy course was going to be offered by the Federal Territory Islamic Religious Affairs Department. Let me try and guess what might be some of the most important qualifications the department will be looking for in the lecturers for this course:

In the advertisement for posts, it should be made very clear that those with happy, uncomplicated, monogamous marriages need not apply.

D.L. Daun

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