Pru 14 is long over. BN and Bugis are battered and breaking bad. But political pundits and philosophers are still at it - enquiring and analysing why the 61-year old government lost so badly, or lost at all.
Official tally shows BN picking up a dismal 35% of the popular vote. Or is it 36%? No matter. You'd struggle to fathom the depth and scale of this defeat. It all felt so unreal and uncannily apocalyptic. I mean, things like this don't happen. The contest was one-sided from the outset, with all the government machinery and media and mountains of money at BN's disposal. Had it been a fair fight, they would have scraped up only three seats. Hyperbolic, so you see my point.
Nobody gave PH a ghost of a chance. Nobody except Rafizi. And maybe Cilisos, a flippant and fun-loving online portal, who had the cheek to advance seven reasons why PH would triumph. Now that PH has won, people are circling back to pore over the seven reasons and still left unconvinced.
TV3 and Utusan predicted, and wanted, a BN win. Bereft of all money and ideas, these shameless and pliant purveyors of fake news had little choice. Merdeka Centre, a purportedly neutral pollster, tipped a comfortable BN win. All foreign media, including Al Jazeera, Bloomberg, WSJ and Myanmar Times, predicted a close contest and rallied around PH, but resigned to a likely BN win. The Economist came the closest (relatively) when it argued that Najib wouldn't win the election. He would steal it.
TV3 and Utusan predicted, and wanted, a BN win. Bereft of all money and ideas, these shameless and pliant purveyors of fake news had little choice. Merdeka Centre, a purportedly neutral pollster, tipped a comfortable BN win. All foreign media, including Al Jazeera, Bloomberg, WSJ and Myanmar Times, predicted a close contest and rallied around PH, but resigned to a likely BN win. The Economist came the closest (relatively) when it argued that Najib wouldn't win the election. He would steal it.
With the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to see why PH won and what more BN should've done to prevent that. Rather than passing the anti-fake news law and crowding Damansara seat with one million Chinese voters, all BN government had to do was to pass a simple law that would make it illegal for a male doctor older than 91 years to contest or even campaign against BN. Hindsight is hindside, all fair and pretty.
How was it possible for the BN juggernaut to lose? The consensus points to none other than ex-PM Dato' Sri Najib. Even Najib himself couldn't disagree with that and found the last bit of moral courage to resign. For avoidance of doubt, Najib here means Najib and wife. I'm latching on lawyers' catch-all convention where singular is also plural and vice versa. Lawyers get away with a lot of things.
Styling himself on Donald Trump, Najib referred to himself as "my brand". Najib is a brand! A brand like Munchy's and Mister Potato are brands. After the election debacle, he lamented that "....they would do anything as long as my brand was destroyed", alluding to hell-bent opposition.
He must have been scammed by his extortionate image maker. Like Nero and Napoleon, he was deep in a delusion of grandeur, stuck in a wild notion that Najib the brand was bigger than Najib the person. Instead of transforming into a winning brand like Hermes, Najib had morphed into 1MDB, the most hated brand on earth. Najib and his brand tanked bigtime.
Say you were in Najib's shoes, whom would you blame for your downfall, apart from yourself? The first name that springs to mind would be Dr Mahathir. Unlike you, he walked and talked like a real person, not a fake brand. He might have slowed or slurred a little, but it's all him, you get what you see. If there was indeed a brand for an idea, it had to be Dr Mahathir.
But you mustn't forget the clutch of characters like Shahrizat, Nazri, Isa, Arul, Apandi, plus lowlifes like Jamal and Jho Low, whose collective impact was complicit in BN's spectacular implosion.
Styling himself on Donald Trump, Najib referred to himself as "my brand". Najib is a brand! A brand like Munchy's and Mister Potato are brands. After the election debacle, he lamented that "....they would do anything as long as my brand was destroyed", alluding to hell-bent opposition.
He must have been scammed by his extortionate image maker. Like Nero and Napoleon, he was deep in a delusion of grandeur, stuck in a wild notion that Najib the brand was bigger than Najib the person. Instead of transforming into a winning brand like Hermes, Najib had morphed into 1MDB, the most hated brand on earth. Najib and his brand tanked bigtime.
Say you were in Najib's shoes, whom would you blame for your downfall, apart from yourself? The first name that springs to mind would be Dr Mahathir. Unlike you, he walked and talked like a real person, not a fake brand. He might have slowed or slurred a little, but it's all him, you get what you see. If there was indeed a brand for an idea, it had to be Dr Mahathir.
But you mustn't forget the clutch of characters like Shahrizat, Nazri, Isa, Arul, Apandi, plus lowlifes like Jamal and Jho Low, whose collective impact was complicit in BN's spectacular implosion.
And who else? I can think of five more names to blame for BN's cataclysmic collapse, ranked from Serious to Not Serious, and somewhere in between.
1. Srikandi Malaya
Even before Pru 13 the prevailing wisdom was that the election would be won or lost at the cyberfront. In the latest edition, the cyber war had evolved into a more organized and sophisticated affair, with an unprecedented measure of venom and vitriol. The last-gasp Anti-Fake News Law, aimed at stifling the intensity to BN's favour, had exactly the opposite impact: more fake news.
As a redundant retiree, I'd all the time to follow both sides of the divide. Anybody could see that BN side were more organised, better funded and fattened with government dedak, with nothing less than a full minister orchestrating the show. PH were strewn all over, no general with a fat warchest. All they had was Rafizi and his slash-and-slander machine, crowdfunded by his cult followers.
Both sides had their cybertroopers, fiercely partisan and passionate FB posters of varying pedigrees: journalists, accountants, lawyers, lecturers and even a fugitive holing up in Manchester. Astonishingly a number of housewives had also jumped in and joined the fray. I'm not sure what was their motivation but most fought for PH, hitting hard with delightful noms de guerre like Ratu Naga, Srikandi Malaya and She Sal. Or garden-variety names like Mariam Mokhtar, one of my favourites. BN had one Salmah Kadir, who was actually a married man.
But better paid BN troops were soundly and roundly beaten. Armed with faulty Samsungs sourced with Arab donation, they were no match for the more imaginative and determined PH combatants. This is all the more remarkable because PH warriors were digging in with the normal fears and risks of siding with the opposition. Ratu Naga was detained by police in the small hours for a defamatory post alleging Najib's wife and Sultan of Pahang were friends. Defamatory? I thought it was a compliment.
The problem with BN side was that they were too obsessed with what they proudly called "facts". It's not they who decide whether something is a fact. It's the readers. So what came from their camp was a cacophony of endless, sanitized statistics, historical graphs, colourful pie charts, pontifiticating verbosities and more statistics. They tried hard to impress with school stuff like GDP, Debt to GDP ratio, Debt to Debt ratio, Ratio to Ratio ratio, Gini Coefficient, Pythagoras theorem, ad nauseam.
This is an election and 2018. Who wants to see graphs and charts? Nobody reads Yorkshire garbage and gibberish. People were busy putting food on the table and had little time for charts and numbers. What honest and hard-working voters want to see is snappy videos, caricatures, clever captions, photoshops, witty and punchy messages and, of course, plenty of "fake" news and fun facts, repeated many times over. The PH pollsters had scoured the market and sensed swaths of unmet demand for this. They not only filled these needs, they also did it with maximum impact and at minimal cost.
This is a fine example of what came out of the PH camp:
This is fun fact. Take a long and hard look. Do you feel shivers rushing down your spine? You won't vote Umno for the next 200 years.
2. BN's Pollster
I don't know who. Maybe it's Ahmad Maslan, Umno's media champion. Or Apco's Paul Stadlen. Or the funky Unifi and talentime guy. Or could it be Cambridge Analytica? Or Encylopaedia Britannica?
But what we now know, this guy was totally, thoroughly, terribly worthless. It's one hell of a crap and con job that he'd pulled off. A disaster of comedic proportions.
In this age of analytics, micro trends and big data, a political pollster should be able to quite accurately sniff out potential voters' mood and mind, and provide reasonable ballparks for action plans. At the height of his game, Rafizi and his mean polling machine Invoke, could update you with PH's predicted number of seats on daily basis.
I'm not sure which polling model BN buffoons used. Maybe the one that Winston Churchill pioneered after the World War II. It fatally failed to read voting sentiments. What it had predicted was an all-round BN victory, which was cheered on by a clueless BN leadership already operating with an air of impregnability (meaning they could never get pregnant haha). With all bungs and bribes promised right to the very last night of the campaign, BN camp was understandbly bullish, with a two-thirds majority increasingly assured. So all their election strategies were conceived based on this feelgood feedback. When they finally discovered the blunder, Dr Mahathir had already been sworn in to become the oldest PM on the planet.
Had BN's pollster or strategist, or whatever you want to call him, done his job and push the panic button, I'd guess Najib would have gone for the Mugabe gambit. Dirty and despicable surely, but at least he'd still be presiding in Putrajaya today instead of scurrying around in Vellfire.
Why did BN's pollster fail so badly? Hard to tell. Maybe he was deceived or duped by potential voters on the ground. Or maybe he was playing to the gallery, telling Najib only what Najib wanted to hear, aware that one negative narrative would land him in the cold storage and out of foodchain. My theory is that the guy was simply lazy, incompetent or even mentally impaired. He was, most of the time, drunk or drugged, or both. See pic below to prove my point hahaha:
3. Profesor Kangkung
You guess how many professors are breathing in Malaysia now? About 3,000 at last count. How many of them make sense? A grand total of one. He's now in the Council of Eminent Persons (clue: not Robert Kuok).
We have in our midst now five Distinguished Professors (Profesor Ulung) on a salary scale of RM 23,800 - RM 31,800 a month, more than Najib's (RM 22,826.65). It's ok if you can't name any of them or don't know why they deserve so much.
There is, or there was, this Majlis Profesor Negara (MPN) whose founding function was, in short, to help the government formulate country's development strategies and programs. They were expected to provide ideas and feedback from the academia. What they actually did was to brownnose the government. They bought in government's corrupt programs and projects with ludicrous academic justification. Instead of speaking openly against 1MDB, Felda, NFC and ECRL scandals, they encouraged and applauded the government at every turn.
Nothing reflects MPN's misplaced wisdom better than this piece of opinion from a senior member of MPN, Prof Mohd Fuad Mat Jali of UKM. In the run-up to the election, he professed that: "Berdasarkan situasi semasa juga tidak mustahil pimpinan DS Najib mampu membawa kemenangan dua pertiga kepada BN........Hasil soal selidik mendapati...... pakatan pembangkang DAP, PKR, PPBM dan Amanah memperolehi 9.2% undi." Prof Ismail Sualman of UiTM went further, mocking and calling PH leaders "Pemimpin Touch N Go".
I'm not sure whom did this profesor kangkong sample. Maybe those who turned up for Umno covention and pledged to defend Najib with their life. PH to get 9.2%? Why not 9.252, Prof? Any Japanese professor caught in this sham would've contemplated a harakiri.
I know no voters listen to professors nowadays, but the government would. Instead of flagging (or even flogging) the flailing government, they'd lulled BN into complacency and nonchalance. To be fair, there were dozens of dons across the more than 500 universities and half-universities in this great country with contrarian and ground-breaking ideas. But they were cowed by Umno thugs into playing along and suffering in silence. The sacred intellectual ethos of "publish or perish" is all but dead. It's more like "government or gone" now.
It took the PH government just one week to take the only option on the table: disband Majlis Profesor Negara.
4. Rajah Bomoh Malaysia
Just where were they when BN most needed them?
That Umno politicians dabble in shamans, charlatans and all forms of witchcraft was pretty much part of the local political folklore. The Umno-Bomoh bond goes back to probably the 80's when Mona Fandey was still an aspiring artiste. It could be earlier.
Politics in Fakeland opens doors to Birkin bags. The stakes in Pru 14 were higher than ever. It was now or never for some politicians on the fringe. They'd take no prisoners in their pursuit and, if necessary, they'd bribe, beat and cheat to win. We could only theorize that they'd turn to magic and witchcraft with no qualms.
Did Umno seek paranormal help to win Pru 14? It's hard to believe, I mean, Najib is literate, talented and immaculate. But rumours hovering over his household, including that telltale piece by his stepdaughter, are unnerving. His chief of intelligence and clandestine operations, a lady Datuk, has been described by the US Embassy as a practitioner of withchcraft. It could be a case of mistaken identity, but a photo of her has gone viral (below), and you can see and decide for yourself. About a week before the election Utusan reported that about 30,0000 pengamal perubatan tradisional (aka bomoh) had endorsed Najib and BN. If you connect the dots, you'd reach the only logical conclusion.
So what's gone wrong? Bomohs failed to deliver? Or had they gone rogue? Raja Bomoh Malaysia Ibrahim Mat Zin had threatened to contest in the election against Dato' Seri Zahid Hamidy, who incidentally was not only the DPM at the time, but also a part-time bomoh. Bomoh vs bomoh? Had Umno people been sharper, they'd have sensed a crack in the Umno-Bomoh cartel, and steered clear of the black arts.
I think bomohs in general have lost their craft and edge. With YouTube and free apps available on the internet, anybody could be a bomoh in half a day. P Ramlee saw this coming 50 years ago. Watch Do Re Mi.
5. Jose Mourinho
1. Srikandi Malaya
Even before Pru 13 the prevailing wisdom was that the election would be won or lost at the cyberfront. In the latest edition, the cyber war had evolved into a more organized and sophisticated affair, with an unprecedented measure of venom and vitriol. The last-gasp Anti-Fake News Law, aimed at stifling the intensity to BN's favour, had exactly the opposite impact: more fake news.
As a redundant retiree, I'd all the time to follow both sides of the divide. Anybody could see that BN side were more organised, better funded and fattened with government dedak, with nothing less than a full minister orchestrating the show. PH were strewn all over, no general with a fat warchest. All they had was Rafizi and his slash-and-slander machine, crowdfunded by his cult followers.
Both sides had their cybertroopers, fiercely partisan and passionate FB posters of varying pedigrees: journalists, accountants, lawyers, lecturers and even a fugitive holing up in Manchester. Astonishingly a number of housewives had also jumped in and joined the fray. I'm not sure what was their motivation but most fought for PH, hitting hard with delightful noms de guerre like Ratu Naga, Srikandi Malaya and She Sal. Or garden-variety names like Mariam Mokhtar, one of my favourites. BN had one Salmah Kadir, who was actually a married man.
But better paid BN troops were soundly and roundly beaten. Armed with faulty Samsungs sourced with Arab donation, they were no match for the more imaginative and determined PH combatants. This is all the more remarkable because PH warriors were digging in with the normal fears and risks of siding with the opposition. Ratu Naga was detained by police in the small hours for a defamatory post alleging Najib's wife and Sultan of Pahang were friends. Defamatory? I thought it was a compliment.
The problem with BN side was that they were too obsessed with what they proudly called "facts". It's not they who decide whether something is a fact. It's the readers. So what came from their camp was a cacophony of endless, sanitized statistics, historical graphs, colourful pie charts, pontifiticating verbosities and more statistics. They tried hard to impress with school stuff like GDP, Debt to GDP ratio, Debt to Debt ratio, Ratio to Ratio ratio, Gini Coefficient, Pythagoras theorem, ad nauseam.
This is an election and 2018. Who wants to see graphs and charts? Nobody reads Yorkshire garbage and gibberish. People were busy putting food on the table and had little time for charts and numbers. What honest and hard-working voters want to see is snappy videos, caricatures, clever captions, photoshops, witty and punchy messages and, of course, plenty of "fake" news and fun facts, repeated many times over. The PH pollsters had scoured the market and sensed swaths of unmet demand for this. They not only filled these needs, they also did it with maximum impact and at minimal cost.
This is a fine example of what came out of the PH camp:
2. BN's Pollster
I don't know who. Maybe it's Ahmad Maslan, Umno's media champion. Or Apco's Paul Stadlen. Or the funky Unifi and talentime guy. Or could it be Cambridge Analytica? Or Encylopaedia Britannica?
But what we now know, this guy was totally, thoroughly, terribly worthless. It's one hell of a crap and con job that he'd pulled off. A disaster of comedic proportions.
In this age of analytics, micro trends and big data, a political pollster should be able to quite accurately sniff out potential voters' mood and mind, and provide reasonable ballparks for action plans. At the height of his game, Rafizi and his mean polling machine Invoke, could update you with PH's predicted number of seats on daily basis.
I'm not sure which polling model BN buffoons used. Maybe the one that Winston Churchill pioneered after the World War II. It fatally failed to read voting sentiments. What it had predicted was an all-round BN victory, which was cheered on by a clueless BN leadership already operating with an air of impregnability (meaning they could never get pregnant haha). With all bungs and bribes promised right to the very last night of the campaign, BN camp was understandbly bullish, with a two-thirds majority increasingly assured. So all their election strategies were conceived based on this feelgood feedback. When they finally discovered the blunder, Dr Mahathir had already been sworn in to become the oldest PM on the planet.
Had BN's pollster or strategist, or whatever you want to call him, done his job and push the panic button, I'd guess Najib would have gone for the Mugabe gambit. Dirty and despicable surely, but at least he'd still be presiding in Putrajaya today instead of scurrying around in Vellfire.
Why did BN's pollster fail so badly? Hard to tell. Maybe he was deceived or duped by potential voters on the ground. Or maybe he was playing to the gallery, telling Najib only what Najib wanted to hear, aware that one negative narrative would land him in the cold storage and out of foodchain. My theory is that the guy was simply lazy, incompetent or even mentally impaired. He was, most of the time, drunk or drugged, or both. See pic below to prove my point hahaha:
3. Profesor Kangkung
You guess how many professors are breathing in Malaysia now? About 3,000 at last count. How many of them make sense? A grand total of one. He's now in the Council of Eminent Persons (clue: not Robert Kuok).
We have in our midst now five Distinguished Professors (Profesor Ulung) on a salary scale of RM 23,800 - RM 31,800 a month, more than Najib's (RM 22,826.65). It's ok if you can't name any of them or don't know why they deserve so much.
There is, or there was, this Majlis Profesor Negara (MPN) whose founding function was, in short, to help the government formulate country's development strategies and programs. They were expected to provide ideas and feedback from the academia. What they actually did was to brownnose the government. They bought in government's corrupt programs and projects with ludicrous academic justification. Instead of speaking openly against 1MDB, Felda, NFC and ECRL scandals, they encouraged and applauded the government at every turn.
Nothing reflects MPN's misplaced wisdom better than this piece of opinion from a senior member of MPN, Prof Mohd Fuad Mat Jali of UKM. In the run-up to the election, he professed that: "Berdasarkan situasi semasa juga tidak mustahil pimpinan DS Najib mampu membawa kemenangan dua pertiga kepada BN........Hasil soal selidik mendapati...... pakatan pembangkang DAP, PKR, PPBM dan Amanah memperolehi 9.2% undi." Prof Ismail Sualman of UiTM went further, mocking and calling PH leaders "Pemimpin Touch N Go".
I'm not sure whom did this profesor kangkong sample. Maybe those who turned up for Umno covention and pledged to defend Najib with their life. PH to get 9.2%? Why not 9.252, Prof? Any Japanese professor caught in this sham would've contemplated a harakiri.
I know no voters listen to professors nowadays, but the government would. Instead of flagging (or even flogging) the flailing government, they'd lulled BN into complacency and nonchalance. To be fair, there were dozens of dons across the more than 500 universities and half-universities in this great country with contrarian and ground-breaking ideas. But they were cowed by Umno thugs into playing along and suffering in silence. The sacred intellectual ethos of "publish or perish" is all but dead. It's more like "government or gone" now.
It took the PH government just one week to take the only option on the table: disband Majlis Profesor Negara.
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| Professor-At-Large Jho Low |
4. Rajah Bomoh Malaysia
Just where were they when BN most needed them?
That Umno politicians dabble in shamans, charlatans and all forms of witchcraft was pretty much part of the local political folklore. The Umno-Bomoh bond goes back to probably the 80's when Mona Fandey was still an aspiring artiste. It could be earlier.
Politics in Fakeland opens doors to Birkin bags. The stakes in Pru 14 were higher than ever. It was now or never for some politicians on the fringe. They'd take no prisoners in their pursuit and, if necessary, they'd bribe, beat and cheat to win. We could only theorize that they'd turn to magic and witchcraft with no qualms.
Did Umno seek paranormal help to win Pru 14? It's hard to believe, I mean, Najib is literate, talented and immaculate. But rumours hovering over his household, including that telltale piece by his stepdaughter, are unnerving. His chief of intelligence and clandestine operations, a lady Datuk, has been described by the US Embassy as a practitioner of withchcraft. It could be a case of mistaken identity, but a photo of her has gone viral (below), and you can see and decide for yourself. About a week before the election Utusan reported that about 30,0000 pengamal perubatan tradisional (aka bomoh) had endorsed Najib and BN. If you connect the dots, you'd reach the only logical conclusion.
So what's gone wrong? Bomohs failed to deliver? Or had they gone rogue? Raja Bomoh Malaysia Ibrahim Mat Zin had threatened to contest in the election against Dato' Seri Zahid Hamidy, who incidentally was not only the DPM at the time, but also a part-time bomoh. Bomoh vs bomoh? Had Umno people been sharper, they'd have sensed a crack in the Umno-Bomoh cartel, and steered clear of the black arts.
I think bomohs in general have lost their craft and edge. With YouTube and free apps available on the internet, anybody could be a bomoh in half a day. P Ramlee saw this coming 50 years ago. Watch Do Re Mi.
5. Jose Mourinho
What?
It's a hypothesis or mere conjecture. Or maybe I've run out of ideas. But just ponder and think if, like me, you haven't been thinking all that much since retiring 10 years ago. Najib is a proud supporter of Manchester United (MU) where Jose Mourinho is the manager or coach. MU came second, a record 19 points behind neighbours Manchester City in the English Premier League (EPL). In EPL, second is as meaningless as second in a three-cornered Pru. Despite spending RM 1 billion on players, Jose has failed to deliver even one trophy.
Angry MU supporters in Malaysia would be hard pressed to find somebody, or a proxy, to blame. What if they saw Jose in Jibby? Hahaha. Preposterous? Remember, the Economist used the price of Big Macs to approximate the true value of a country's currency.
According to MU's syok-sendiri statistics, their global fanbase was about 4 billion, or about half of world's population. In the previous election (Pru 13), about 48% of voters voted Najib. Assuming the same voting pattern and using profesor kangkung's extrapolation, half of these voters (24%) should be MU supporters, and they vented their anger on Jose by voting out Najib in Pru 14, leaving Najib with the remaining 24%. As it turned out, Najib got 35%. I'm off by 11 percentage points.
Majlis Profesor Negara predicted a minimum two-thirds or 66% vote for BN. What BN actually got was 35%. A massive and embarassing 31% point difference. Compare that with only 11% margin using my simplistic Jose Mourinho theory. Don't you think I should be a Distinguished Professor?
It's a hypothesis or mere conjecture. Or maybe I've run out of ideas. But just ponder and think if, like me, you haven't been thinking all that much since retiring 10 years ago. Najib is a proud supporter of Manchester United (MU) where Jose Mourinho is the manager or coach. MU came second, a record 19 points behind neighbours Manchester City in the English Premier League (EPL). In EPL, second is as meaningless as second in a three-cornered Pru. Despite spending RM 1 billion on players, Jose has failed to deliver even one trophy.
Angry MU supporters in Malaysia would be hard pressed to find somebody, or a proxy, to blame. What if they saw Jose in Jibby? Hahaha. Preposterous? Remember, the Economist used the price of Big Macs to approximate the true value of a country's currency.
According to MU's syok-sendiri statistics, their global fanbase was about 4 billion, or about half of world's population. In the previous election (Pru 13), about 48% of voters voted Najib. Assuming the same voting pattern and using profesor kangkung's extrapolation, half of these voters (24%) should be MU supporters, and they vented their anger on Jose by voting out Najib in Pru 14, leaving Najib with the remaining 24%. As it turned out, Najib got 35%. I'm off by 11 percentage points.
Majlis Profesor Negara predicted a minimum two-thirds or 66% vote for BN. What BN actually got was 35%. A massive and embarassing 31% point difference. Compare that with only 11% margin using my simplistic Jose Mourinho theory. Don't you think I should be a Distinguished Professor?
 |
| Jibby And Jose |
