Three days that will shake Malaysia

I have been engulfed with sadness these days and overwhelmed by it yesterday, as I follow closely the developments leading to our “mother of al elections”. I am referring to the alleged flying in of dubious voters via special/chartered flights that might be the factor in deciding the victory of BN come May 6, 2013. On the status page of my Facebook, I wrote these notes:

1) DEEP SADNESS...

My feelings tonight... thinking of the magnitude of fraud and possible degree of destruction to my beloved nation... three days to the important day and major issues are not resolved yet. We are going to have an election and pretend that the winner will still govern our lives carrying a fraudulent mandate... sadness engulfing me - ar

2) GE13... a question.

Dilemma...

should we let Nature take its course

and Fate to dictate Free Will?

or should we tie our camel to the olive tree

and pray that it'll not be stolen while we watch

                                       the elections drama of the century? - ar

How do we understand our shattering hope and at the same time address our rage against the machine?

The latest allegation of the flying in of tens of thousands of dubious voters, whilst being made public and the nation now alarmed, could be a factor to shatter the hopes of Malaysian to taste a free and fair election. It is a serious allegation with far-ranging consequences.

A shattering Malaysian hope?
What will another win for BN entail, given its massive control of the media, men, machinery and even the minds of those it has clutched for 55 years in this grand narrative of hypermodernity, oriental despotism, hegemony, and the propping of a façade to disguise a failing state?

How will revenge and retribution look like? How will Malaysians see another period of time and energy wasted to settle scores - time ought to be used for national building and the improvement of the lives, minds, and souls of all Malaysians?

We have unresolved issues which make me wonder if we are actually ready to have an election. Project MyKad or IC in Sabah, the Sulu intrusion, postal voter ballot secrecy, alleged delibility of the indelible ink, and now the mega-issue of all, the “now-every-phantom-voter-can-fly” allegation - all these and what else are making this an election not only plagued with fraud, but one that is shaking the country at its fundamental core.

We are at a beautiful juncture in which we are seeing a genuine and heart-warming display of progressive multiculturalism and religious understanding at the grassroots and the responsive and responsible party-politics levels - something we have not seen much since the days of Mahathirism.

Yet the threat looming is the might of the machine that is pounding us to render us helpless in the face of a potentially fraudulent outcome of a most decisive election. We are seeing a no-shame display of the abuse power of a caretaker government in all aspects of campaigning.

A larger issue is our rage against the machine - one that is a marriage between the ideology, ideological apparatuses, and the corporate institutions whose interest have been to profit from the rakyat and to continue to patron a dying regime. This is an issue of political-economy.

Seriously, it is a structural and systemic political-economic issue of interlocking directorate-ships, controlling interests and a lack of basic ethics.

Knowing that companies which you support and patron for years are involved in aligning themselves with political parties that work against the interest of the people's just and peaceful demand for good governance ...

Knowing that these companies, some huge ones in telecommunications, shipping, infrastructure, entertainment and air transportation, are closely-linked with the political parties that are all out to destroy that nation in a fraudulent election that will destroy the future of our children, what then must one do?

Should these companies be fully-exposed of their link - to educate the people they profit from all these years and a public inquiry be made of the future of their operations?

It is a systemic and structural issue - an ugly aspect of the legacy of ‘Malaysia Inc.’, ‘privatisation’, and also that ‘Look East Policy’. In a country harbouring despotic inter-generational regimes such as Malaysia, for whom do these corporations serve?

What must we do?

How then must they be dismantled? Which pied piper paid for their pathological actions of bulldozing the rights of the people to have a safe and sane election for the sake of the peaceful and ethical evolution of a Malaysian nation - one in which a society is not made of phantom voters, instantly-made-legal illegal immigrants or simply those unfit to be taken in as "Malaysian citizens".

What then must we do to these corporate accomplices to the process of destruction of our beloved nation?

It is time to think of new telecommunications, infrastructural developments, and public transportation providers, etc. after this election.

It is time to seriously explore ownership and the control of companies based on the ‘cooperative system’ rather than leave everything to the ‘magic of the marketplace’ and the bulls and bears in the marketplace. There are actually no bulls nor bears, but beasts in corporate masks run by over-glorified propped-up billionaires created as ‘models of entrepreneurial excellence’.

There are only ‘great CEOs’ as inspiration to each race and religion that need a story of ‘rags-to-riches’ of our own myth of Horatio Alger - a narrative that the rakyat can salivate upon while still locked in the master-slave narrative of a Malaysian economy that is now a sinking bahtera merdeka, the great ship of Malaysian independence.

What then must we do in these remaining "three days that will shake Malaysia"?

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DR AZLY RAHMAN, who was born in Singapore and grew up in Johor Baru, holds a Columbia University (New York) doctorate in International Education Development and Master's degrees in the fields of Education, International Affairs, Peace Studies and Communication. He has taught more than 40 courses in six different departments and has written more than 300 analyses on Malaysia. His teaching experience spans Malaysia and the United States, over a wide range of subjects from elementary to graduate education. He currently resides in the United States. He has edited and written three books on Malaysia:  Multiethnic Malaysia: Past, Present and Future (2009), Thesis on Cyberjaya: Hegemony and Utopianism in a Southeast Asian State (2012) , and the latest The 'Allah Controversy and Other Essays on Malaysian Hypermodernity (2013)