Why Malaysian Leaders Refuse Accountability

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Nehru Sathiamoorthy:
A servant is someone that studies the face of the master. That is the servant’s expertise. He or she is an expert in studying the face of the master to see whether the master is pleased or displeased. If everyone is silent and from the master’s countenance, the servant discerns that the master is displeased, the servant will speak up. If the servant speaks up but the master appears displeased, then the servant will be silent.
To ask whether a servant believes in such things as democracy, human rights, religious laws, secularism, native rights, multiculturalism, meritocracy or whatever is missing the forest for the tree. The servant is not at all concerned about any such matters. Today a servant can speak for multiculturalism and tomorrow they can speak against it. Today they can fight for religious laws and tomorrow they can fight for secular laws. They can do all this because they don’t really care about religious laws or secular laws or multiculturalism or whatnot. What they chiefly care about is whether the master is pleased or displeased. If that something will please the master, they will do it. If not, they will be against it. Pleasing their master is the only thing that a servant considers to be their duty in life.
As a rule, democracy only works amongst people who are free. When you are free, you are neither a master nor a servant. Instead, you are your own person. You have your own thinking about what you should or shouldn’t do, and you will do it without forcing yourself on others or letting others force themselves on you.
When a group of free men and women form a group, the system they will choose to govern the group is inevitably democracy. In such a system, everybody is considered equal and has one vote. If the group has to decide on just one course of action, everybody will get to say what they think that action should be, and then they will put the options they have discussed to vote. The option that obtains the most number of votes will be accepted as the action that the group agrees to undertake, and the person who was the chief advocate of that action will be chosen as the leader of the group to forward that action. That is why in a democracy, you have to have an election every four or five years. You must have an election periodically, because the leader of a democracy is not a master, but merely a “first amongst equal”, who was chosen by the group to undertake a specific set of actions for a specific period of time. When the time lapses, or in the other words, when their term ends, the leaders will lose his mandate, and will no longer be seen as the head of the group anymore.
Malaysia however, has never been a country of free people. I am not saying this to disrespect us, but just to state a self-evident fact. We have always been a country that has masters and servants. This fact should be obvious to any student of history.
The only reason why we practise democracy today, was because democracy was imposed on us by our former colonial masters.
Ironically, although our former colonial masters themselves acted as masters and treated us like servants when they ruled our land, when they left, they decided to see us as a free people and chose democracy as the form of government that is best suited for us.
But just giving a donkey a suit will not make it a gentleman. As a matter of fact, all it will do is turn it into an ass with a delusion of standing.
In the same way, just giving a country filled with masters and servants democracy, will not make the masters forget they are masters or transform servants into free people. Instead, all that democracy will do to a group of people who have no concept of equality or freedom, is make the masters not feel that they have to be responsible for anything and make the servants susceptible to corruption.
The corruption part is something that needs no further explanation – all of us know about the state of corruption in Malaysia. A big part of why a country like Malaysia is corrupt is because many of the people who are in a position of authority today have a servant mentality. As long as a servant thinks that it is his or her master that takes care of his or her need, they will resign themselves to make do with whatever it is that their master gives them. When a servant thinks that they themselves have to take care of their needs however, then there is no end to what they will take for themselves before they can be satisfied that they have enough.
As for the the part where having democracy amongst a population who have no concept of freedom or equality will cause us to have masters who refuse to take responsibility for anything, previously, we have already seen such an example in the Najib trial, and now we are seeing it in Mahathir’s cabinet refusing to take responsibility for their collective decision on not pursuing Malaysia’s right to reclaim Batu Puteh.
 
Despite saying repeatedly before that every decision that was taken in the Mahathir cabinet was a collective decision that they all agreed upon, now three of the ministers in the Mahathir cabinet is now saying that they had no role in Mahathir’s Batu Puteh decision and blaming the entire decision on Mahathir alone.
According to Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, Loke Siew Fook, and Mohamad Sabu, who were the deputy prime minister, transport minister, and defence minister respectively at the time, they were only informed of Mahathir’s decision not to proceed with the applications to review and interpret the 2008 ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the rocky island, and therefore, the issue of whether anyone objected or supported (the decision) did not arise.
In other words, they are all claiming that they thought they sat in the position of masters who were supposed to assume responsibility of running the nation, in truth, they were actually just servants whose job was to study Master Mahathir’s face. If Master Mahathir was pleased, they stayed silent and it was only when Master Mahathir looked displeased, they would speak up.
It is precisely because the people in our region have a master-servant mentality, not the mindset of a free people, that the most successful leaders in Southeast Asia tend to have an authoritarian streak.
From Mahathir during the first period of his reign to Lee Kuan Yew to Duterte to Taib Mahmud, it is only leaders who are not afraid to take the position of an olden time king or a modern day dictator that is successful in ruling a southeast Asian nation.
We won’t transform into a free people, just because a colonial master handed us the form of governance of free people to us.
We will only became free people if we fight for our freedom, or like in the case of Singapore, we have a benevolent despot like Lee Kuan Yew, who takes charge and then transform through example and imposition, the people that he is charge of, into becoming more like him and less like themselves.
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