AS another race to become the next prime minister of Malaysia settles, and Ismail Sabri Yaakob has emerged as the clear favourite to succeed Muhyiddin Yassin, dissatisfaction and opposition against the direction of the country are expected to follow. 

Some would even argue that the fall of Muhyiddin’s government, as well as Anwar Ibrahim and the opposition’s inability to obtain a simple majority to form a government, would ultimately be Umno’s gain.

Rather than accelerating the fall of Muhyiddin, some argue that it would be more strategic to consider the last-minute reforms that Muhyiddin had haphazardly proposed in a bid to salvage his prime minister post.

Yet, apart from the two-term limit for prime ministers and the implementation of anti-hopping laws, Muhyiddin’s government could have passed those reforms without bipartisan support, as there were no parliamentary obstacles stopping Muhyiddin from doing so.

The executive certainly did not need to pass a bill to formalize bipartisan consultation for future budget bills.

They merely needed to allocate more time for debates in Parliament and accept input from the opposition, like how mature democracies function. There was also nothing hindering the prime minister from providing equal funds to the opposition MPs.

The fact that Muhyiddin used the reforms as his bargaining chip is an insult to civil society groups, which have been advocating for those reforms since the very beginning. 

Muhyiddin even had the gall to promise that he would expedite the implementation of Undi18 in return for support.

The Undi18 bill was a piece of legislation that almost had bipartisan support. Yet, Muhyiddin’s administration did nothing to implement it. 

It is no wonder that the group behind Undi18 issued a strong statement criticising Muhyiddin for using youth voting rights as a political carrot to save his prime ministership.

Muhyiddin also promised a series of parliamentary reforms, which included the composition of select committees that would reflect the actual numbers of MPs from government and opposition.

This means that select committees would be represented by an equal number of government and opposition backbenchers.

Again, this could have been implemented during Muhyiddin’s rule as prime minister.

I had written previously that the former prime minister’s fate would have been very different if he had strengthened Parliament to reinforce his legitimacy.

Some would argue that Muhyiddin’s sincerity to these series of reforms is inconsequential to the larger picture. 

However, Muhyiddin should have foreseen that Zahid Hamidi and his Umno comrades would not sit still and therefore, the overture to the opposition could have been made much earlier.

If Muhyiddin was indeed desperate enough, he could have even taken the initiative to set in place some of the reforms that he mooted.

Muhyiddin should have promoted some of the reforms while he was in power, instead of doing so only when his legitimacy as prime minister was challenged.

His call for reform lacked conviction and certainly displayed a desperate leader who was close to losing his power. 

Lest we forget, this prime minister was also the same person who had publicly promised to amend the draconian Security Offences (Special Measures) Act 2012 (Sosma).

Yet, Muhyiddin was dissatisfied with the decision by former attorney-general Tommy Thomas to drop the Sosma charges against 12 individuals accused of supporting the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, as revealed in the former AG’s memoir. Muhyiddin was the home minister at the time, which was during Pakatan Harapan’s (PH) rule.

While most ministries had in some ways undergone a change during the PH administration, there was little change within the Home Ministry that was helmed by Muhyiddin.

The use of detention without trial laws and police abuses were still largely prevalent when Muhyiddin was the home affairs minister.

After becoming prime minister, Muhyiddin replaced the Independent Police Complaints of Misconduct Commission bill that he previously backed with a watered-down version in the form of the Independent Police Conduct Commission.

Muhyiddin must not forget that he was not only elected to oust the government previously led by Najib Razak. He was elected to fulfil the PH coalition’s promise to implement the reforms that he read out to the nation through a teleprompter on the eve of his resignation.

The fact that the reforms, which were part of the electoral promise by the PH coalition, was invoked by Muhyiddin as a last-ditch effort to cling on to power, says enough about the dubiousness of his olive branch. – August 22, 2021.

* Kenneth Cheng has always been interested in the interplay between human rights and government but more importantly he is a father of two cats, Tangyuan and Toufu. When he is not attending to his feline matters, he is most likely reading books about politics and human rights or playing video games. He is a firm believer in the dictum “power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will”.