COMMENT | A higher power than the powers-that-be

COMMENT | Malaysian politics is like a perpetual-motion machine, never still, always looking for a new course. The Johor state election is barely over (in a literal sense, but still virally alive within Umno ranks), and the hoopla razzmatazz shifts to Umno’s general assembly and DAP’s congress, with PKR’s following after.

Ho-hum.

They won’t get it. The low turnout of voters just means a majority were not engaged in the process – couldn’t be bothered, nothing to do with them, whatever.

Media analyses and comments have scrabbled through the figures and talked of a fractious opposition, failure of leadership, etc.

They have sounded the death knell for Pejuang. Its conception was still-born from the start. Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad invokes a return to the original spirit of Umno, which he defines as looking after the Malays… but not forgetting the others.

Tun, it’s the constant forgetting, lapses of memory, except during election campaign times, over decades by Umno and its token associates, which led to the up-swelling of votes by the “others” that swept you in for a second time as prime minister.

And – eh, Tun, the generation who was around at the beginning, their numbers are shrinking, no thanks to that other perpetual motion machine – mortality.

As for the subsequent generations, the Umno they know is the Umno that is now anathema to you too.

Talking of being past shelf life, I was Anwar Ibrahim’s junior in University Malaya during his...