reduced and recycled

You would’ve thought he’d given up by now. I admire his fighting spirit, of course, though- no, not really. I read the article in the NST today and thought I’d do a review for myself.

The momentous events, etc.

1. NST flashes a large frontpage thing about closing eyes. Where I come from, “close my eyes” means to die, usually muttered by hapless parents with unruly kids. It becomes the first in a series of nails in someone’s coffin.
2. Lim Kit Siang, elder statesman and DAP head honcho, wishes to refer the NST to the committee of rights and privileges.. now, I’ll be honest: why the hell for? I don’t see the NST being part of parliament, so shouldn’t he take it up with those fellas who issue newspaper licenses or some such? The mystery goes unsolved, because-
3. En Shahrir declares his resignation as head honcho of the Backbencher’s Club following a vote against Lim Kit Siang’s motion. You cannot imagine the backlash this creates. The fallout is immense. MP for Jasin, En Said, admits to being the one mentioned by the NST. He says, to paraphrase, that he was just helping out a bumiputera company, a member of his constituency.
4. Shahrir backs down and says everyone’s getting it wrong after En Nazri, En Najib and En Abdullah Badawi all come out, in their various capacities, declaring that you cannot vote with your conscience; you must vote according to party lines. Now, I’m not a great political scientist or philosopher, so I’ll just mention here that I think something is disastrously wrong with those statements…hor?
5. In the meantime, the NST launches another front page assault. The forwarding agent, apparently, is a company called “Binyu Sof Enterprise”, provides a picture of the registered address of said company - surprise, surprise, it’s En Mohd Said Bin Yusof’s home!! - with nice concrete parameter gate and a fricking bungalow, wei!
6. With nowhere left to run, En Said admits to being the full owner of Binyu Sof Enterprise… and the public goes wild! The parliament is in riot and the DAP has a field day! In the meantime, En Said admits that the company is his. So basically, he was, technically, helping out a bumiputera company - but he didn’t tell anyone he was helping himself out! Gasp! Le horror, le horror (or something like that)!

So Shahrir, now, is vindicated. He can crawl up from behind the shield of political expedience since he won’t be losing his job very soon - I think. Shahrir, it appears, is now justified in voting with his conscience. But think of the immense fallout. The fact that Nazri, Najib and the PM came right out to declare that MPs need to vote along party lines, and now have received a slap in the face so hard they’ve got to remain silent and hope the problem blows over.

Where is their credibility now?

But the fact that the MP from Jasin is sowing red herrings today is instructive: he really does believe there is no way out for him. He didn’t, after all, deny the fact that he did ask Customs Officers to break regulations. He didn’t deny, also, that such requests were wrong, calling “close one eye” a Malaccan way of saying things… uh huh. No amount of wayang kulit is going to hide his wrong-doing now.

I feel, however, that there’s something else behind accusing the Director General of Customs of being vengeful. I mean, think about it. Here we have an UMNO stalwart calling out some “errors” he sees in the way the Immigrations are run. As a result, the Customs department hits back with an expose of Mohd Said’s dealings (I agree with En Said: how else would journalists have known if the Customs Department didn’t say anything).

Two things get thrown to light: corruption amongst MPs and bad management within the Customs Department. As a result of the spotlight, the electorate are exposed to a hint of the shady backoffice activities of government.

This, of course, is clearly in line with PM Badawi’s call for a more transparent and more corruption-free government. But is PM Badawi’s stance worth the fallout? What if more UMNO MPs - not just BN ones - get called out? And what if the ones affected included his own coterie of trusted MPs? (All this, of course, works on the assumption that the public does come to know of these shady dealings…)

Hmmm. So how will things play out now?