Last week something strange happened.
During a debate in the Dewan Rakyat on Feb 28, Datuk Wan Saiful Wan Jan claimed he was threatened to express support for Anwar.
He claimed that he had received a phone call that threatened him to support Anwar. If he supported Anwar, he said, he would receive RM 1.7 million to be spent on his constituency.
The strange thing is that though Wan Saiful said the phone calls he received were threatening, he followed up on the phone call and met with the people who threatened him not only once, but many times, all across hotels around Kuala Lumpur. According to him, the first meeting he had was on January 17 at Westin Hotel, followed by another at the JW Marriot Hotel, with one also scheduled for the end of February at the Corus Hotel.
You would think that if somebody calls you and threatens you, you would either take offense to the threat or be scared, and report the matter to the authorities, but not Wan Saiful. Despite claiming that he was threatened, he gladly went to meet the people who threatened him, like he was meeting old friends.
The way Wan Saiful responded to the threats he received, I must say, is making me feel that all of us should regularly be threatened and warned, because it sounds like a jolly fun experience.
Meeting friends, by the way, was what exactly Wan Saiful did when he met those who threatened and warned him. One of the persons he met, he said, was actually a friend, who he refused to name. Wan Saiful, I must say, has a very strange concept of friends. I don’t know how you can be friends with somebody who threatens you, but Wan Saiful, it seems, has no such problem. Although he claims that his own friend was a part of the group of people who threatened him, Wan Saiful is still so protective of his friend, that he is refusing to give the name of his friend to the authorities. I know you are supposed to be loyal to your friends, but Wan Saiful is taking his idea of loyalty to a whole other level.
It boggles my mind to imagine how a friendship like this can work.
Anyway, Wan Saiful allegation created a whole lot of ruckus in the parliament.
Zahid Hamidi, the BFF of Prime Minister Anwar, was so upset by what Wan Saiful said, that he immediately tabled a motion seeking Wan Saiful's suspension from the Dewan Rakyat for six months over his remarks.
According to Zahid, Wan Saiful was out of line for alleging that the Prime Minister had abused his power and for misusing the name of the King to wrongly influence the dewan rakyat.
I don’t know how Wan Saiful used the name of the king to influence rakyat. I could probably research it, but I hope you will understand why, dear readers, that I really don’t feel like researching it, because how much attention and effort am I supposed to give to the story of a man who is loyal to a friend who threatens him and asks him to do dishonourable things. Let us just say for argument's sake that somewhere along the line of all the things that he was blabbing about, Wan Saiful also invoked the name of the King to strengthen his argument.
Anyway, after Zahid Hamidi called for him to be suspended for 6 months, Wan Saiful made a 180 degrees turn, faster than Thanos can snap his fingers.
Before you can say what, Wan Saiful had apologised to the Yang di-Pertuan Agong and Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim for his remarks.
"I retract my statement and I apologise. I humbly apologise if I have touched on matters pertaining to His Majesty," he said in the Dewan Rakyat.
The Dewan Rakyat speaker, Tan Sri Johari Abdul, who gave Wan Saiful a chance to retract his statement, was so happy with Wan Saiful’s retraction, that he asked Zahid Hamidi whether he could accept Wan Saiful's apology and retraction.
Ahmad Zahid accepted Wan Saiful’s apology and withdrew his motion to suspend Wan Saiful, and when he withdrew his motion, he also drew the applause from the MPs in the house, as if some sort of achievement had been made
I have no idea why the entire circus was worthy of applause.
An MP had said that he was threatened to support the PM or face repercussions, and even stated that he knew one of the people who threatened him and gave the location and date of the place where he met all those people who threatened him.
Despite that, he was made to retract his statement without being asked to explain why he made the statement in the first place. Did he lie? Was he drunk? Was he taking medication that made him delusional and imagine things that did not happen? Was he under psychiatric evaluation? None of this was mentioned.
Instead, he just said he was sorry, without explaining to any of us as to whether he was lying or delusional, and all our esteemed member of the parliament, accepted his apology, and even gave him a standing ovation, when Zahid Hamidi withdrew the motion to kick him out of the parliament, as if what happened was not a sign of just how absurd and pathetic our MPs are, but a rare exhibit of the magnanimity and high mindedness in the parliament.
When I was a teenager, I used to look at my cousins who were in their 30s and 40s, and thought they were so wise and respect worthy, because they have gotten everything figured out. Now that I am in my 40s, I can see that I was actually quite wrong.
Age promises nothing other than grey hair and death.
As to whether you will become wise and respect worthy as you age, it really depends on what you believe in and what you practise.
If you believe in something true and respect worthy – like if you believe that just like you value yourself, other people also must value themselves, and therefore you should respect their time, person and intelligence, just like you would like your time, person and intelligence respected, and if you practise this belief diligently, as you grow older, the chances are good that as you age, you will become wise and respect-worthy.
If not, you can look forward to becoming a member of parliament in our country. * *facepalm*
Nehru Sathiamoorthy is the author of “While Waiting for the World to end”. He was a columnist at FMT and a frequent contributor to the South China Morning Post, The Star, Malaysia-Today, MalaysiaNow, MalaysiaKini and Focus Malaysia.
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