BY : SELVARAJA SOMIAH
If you have read my articles more than once, you
would know that I detest demagogues. Not for personal or aesthetic reasons, but
because in the twenty five years that I have covered Sabah politics, I have
observed that the political culture demagoguery breeds is to blame for most of
our economic and political problems. It has been my humble observation that
whenever Sabah was ruled by a supposedly charismatic leader, skilled in the
arts of demagoguery, Sabah suffered while the
leader continued to look good.
This is because demagogues rarely bother to deliver
on their grandiose promises to remove poverty and bring development since they
are confident that their ‘charisma’ is what brings in the votes and not their
work. It is sadly true that they have far too often been proved right by
voters.
So, when I saw demagoguery resoundingly trashed in
the recent GE13 in Sabah , it lit a small
flicker of hope in my cynical old heart. In Sabah ,
voters had a choice between an array of demagogues and a quiet, little man who
allowed the work he had done in the past ten years to speak for him. Well done Sabah for voting for Musa Aman instead of the demagogues
and poseurs who came to defeat him with their charisma and their party tricks.
Musa Aman’s main rival was a very skilled demagogue
called Lajim Ukin. So skilled that he has shown himself to be undefeatable
despite allegations that he made millions from lopsided agreements that the
Sabah Local Government had signed away to his cronies when he was Minister of
Local Government and Housing, and while he was busy with his slot machines.
The local government he was heading went to pieces
but Lajim thrived. After moving to a parliamentary seat, he came to Putajaya to
become a celebrated federal deputy cabinet minister despite doing as little for
the housing as he did for Sabah . He got away
with his lack of administrative abilities by being such a brilliant demagogue.
His demagoguery even served to conceal the utter lack of any sort of ability that
he showed as minister.
The voters of Sabah
did well by making sure he failed to defend his incumbency in his Beaufort
Parlimentary seat, and in his state seat of Klias Lajim won by a slim majority
of 342 seats after obtaining 6,324 votes. They did even better to reject the
advances of a another demagogue Anwar Ibrahim. He warned Sabahan voters that
they would be making a big mistake if they voted for Musa Aman because he was a
chief minister who had squandered the state and allowed centralisation of power.
Musa Aman chose not to respond to the charges flung
at him and instead talked of how Sabah had improved in the past ten years and
brought more development to Sabah and fought
for more de-centralisation and delegation of power back to the state government.
At an annual economic growth of 8 per cent in the past five years (compared to
2.5 per cent before), there are visible differences in Sabah that were
excellently reported by the Daily Express newspaper’s editor in two articles
last month.
From our weakness for demagogues have come the
political dynasties that now control most political parties in Malaysia
Remember Shahrizat’s “lembu” episode? Yes, from
this comes the tendency to see politics as business and then inevitably we have
one or other member of the family who is projected as a commercial genius who
mysteriously makes a lot of money very quickly while his wife or brother or
sister goes into politics.
If this can happen in Sabah, then there really is
hope of Malaysia
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