SEPTEMBER 19 — The easiest thing to be is afraid. If there is one lesson our education in Malaysia offers us by the truckload is fear. Giving in to fear is the safest option.
I have been wondering for days, trying to make head or tail about Muda’s decision to not bother about Mahkota’s by-election in Johor. Nomination day was five days ago, and only BN (with Pakatan’s support) and PN filed papers for a two-horse race. Maybe the youth party ran out of printer ink, or is waiting for e-filing to be instituted in order to save the planet before Malaysia.
Since the five-state polls last year, Muda has serially avoided by-elections like herpes.
While the relative social merits of venereal diseases are hard to justify, it is even harder to justify how a political party with national aspirations evades elections.
But here they are, pretending like an election is not occurring an hour’s drive from either of their two elected seats in the same state. Ex-president Syed Saddiq Syed Abdul Rahman’s Muar is on the western coast, and acting president Amira Aisya Abdul Aziz’s Puteri Wangsa is down south to the causeway.
Both are Johor-born. The party has only won in Johor. The mystery stupefies.
What excuse is possible?
Clone our leader
So, I go down to their Facebook, TikTok and website, to look for the excuse. Or a fragment of an excuse.
None present.
However, these other delectables were present.
They have Muda Fest on October 19 — vendors, you have only two days left to book a booth! (There is the occasional PSA in this column, thank you very much). And a litany of Syed Saddiq videos validating something or running somewhere.
Festivals are fun, and recruitment in cool surroundings of a city mall is important. However, a national party is likely to do 50 different things in 50 different places every weekend, not an explanation to skip Mahkota.
The other thing, well, there is being dense and pretending to be dense.
Here in chronological order:
Muda and Syed Saddiq championed all leaders convicted of crimes to leave their party posts until they absolve themselves.
Muda and Syed Saddiq were shell-shocked — and duly experienced other types of PTSD — when the court found the then-president guilty, on November 9, 2023.
Muda leaders have hands on mouths but pride swells in their kindred hearts when Syed Saddiq resigns immediately as Muda president. “What a man of principle,” they whisper silently to themselves, willing to let go, do what all those old decrepit leaders from the other parties are unwilling to countenance.
They all do an on the spot little jig not unlike an Irish Riverdance performance.
Muda’s deputy president Amira Aisya is elevated to acting president. She solemnly accepts the responsibility without any dancing.
Muda, Syed Saddiq and Amira Aisya carry on with Syed Saddiq as the key figure, promoter and image of the party. They remove him from the stationery. They stop calling him president.
Perhaps now they call him big hombre, the soul of the party (except replace the y with ee), El Duce, capo or chief, but never, never president. Yes, that does the trick. They should try de facto leader, see if the hat fits.
Maybe in some ways, they are exactly like the older politicians.
Not the same as the rest
There are 66 registered parties in Malaysia. Why pick on Muda for opting out of Mahkota?
To begin with PN, Pakatan and BN constitute about 15 of them, and another 30 from Borneo — betting money says at least one of them operates out of a massage saloon in Miri or Sandakan. Nor is the core of modern democracy at risk when Malaysian Punjabi Party or People’s Alternative Party fail to show up with a candidate.
Muda presents a different proposition.
Muda worries all the major parties. PN’s home minister opposed its registration, and odds are a Pakatan or Umno home minister would behave similarly. It took the courts to realise Muda. The home minister was forced to relent because a court order was issued.
There are 66 parties, but there is only one party which a judge brought to life, not a minister. That’s a gift, that’s a sign.
Don’t let it go to waste.
Do not become the political party which acts like a civil society group standing outside government buildings to show disdain with placards.
Be a political party, contest for the people’s vote.
Less careful
Amira Aisya is 29 years old. To say it is daunting, is to put it mildly. To lead a national party, most 50-year-olds with double masters will experience an epileptic fit.
But as they say, here they are, in this situation.
The ball is in their court.
Old people have so much advice to spare and Muda’s peeps might want the senior citizens to stuff it.
“You have all these lessons but you never did anything like this in your time!”
They’d use that line to shut us outsiders up, except add a hashtag to each word.
Now is their turn. To do what generations before failed to have the courage to.
Yes, it is their turn. So, use the turn.
Which means running into elections, not away from them.
To not negotiate cooperation 24 hours before nomination day. That’s old politics, the one Muda despises. Despise it proper, with all the zeal and self-righteousness political idealism offers. Naïve? Sure. Foolish? Not so sure. Victory? Never certain, but the established order is afraid, and that is not nothing.
Electoral defeats can destroy parties.
But there is an antecedent and superior point. There is no party without electoral experience, win or lose.
Leaders have used fear to silence younger Malaysians for years.
Muda can represent a future less reliant on fear but first it must try to represent.
That is through elections not by sitting out and waiting for a perfect moment that never arrives.
Ageing is a crude way to say acquiring experience. Muda should age. For the other option is more terrifying. To wait, and wait and people forget your name. To vanish.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
