They say if a saint blesses you, good fortune will follow.
Going by that logic, I suppose that when a sinner like Deputy Prime Minister Zahid Hamidi has bestowed high praise on Abang Johari recently, Abang Jo’s seven-year streak of good fortune should be coming to an end in the not-too-distant future.
According to Zahid, under Abang Johari’s leadership, Sarawak has become the "most politically stable state," which has in turn made Abang Johari popular not only in Malaysia but throughout ASEAN and Asia as well.
I am not sure why Zahid considers Abang Jo to be popular in ASEAN and Asia – I don’t think anybody outside of Malaysia knows who he is – but I will agree that Abang Jo’s reign has indeed been a most fortunate time for Sarawak. Since Abang Jo took over the reins of Sarawak in 2017, Sarawak has become like a genie in a bottle to Kuching, granting it almost everything it asks for without question.
But rather than credit Sarawak’s good fortune to Abang Jo’s skills and abilities, I would say that it is more due to his incredible streak of luck that Sarawak has been very fortunate during Abang Jo’s reign.
Abang Jo, for lack of a better word, is indeed a very lucky person. He is incredibly lucky because, despite having little to no skills and talents, he has done very well for himself.
I say Abang Jo has little to no skills or talent because, according to his Wikipedia entry, Abang Jo couldn’t even make it to university after he finished secondary school, despite his father being the Yang di-Pertua of Sarawak at the time.
Imagine how lacking in abilities you must have been to not be able to go to university after finishing secondary school, despite your father being the YDP of the largest state in the nation. If you couldn’t make it to university even if your father was the Yang di-Pertua of the state, it could mean that 1) you are so hopeless that even your father thinks it is a waste of time for you to continue your studies, or 2) the task of improving yourself must have been such a difficult chore that even if your father could get you into a university, you didn’t want to go because you found it burdensome and stressful.
Despite not being the sharpest tool in the shed, Abang Jo was blessed with luck. Not only did past Sarawakian leaders like Abdul Rahman Ya’kub and Taib Mahmud take a liking to him and carry him up the ranks despite his lack of contributions, skills, or talent, but he was also lucky that right after he was promoted to being the deputy premier of Sarawak in 2016, the incredibly popular Premier of Sarawak, Adenan Satem, suddenly and unexpectedly passed away in 2017.
Abang Jo was again lucky when, out of Adenan Satem’s three deputies at the time, he was the one who was promoted to become the Premier in 2017.
If that much luck is not enough, Abang Jo again hit the lucky jackpot when in 2018, the BN government that had ruled the nation since independence fell for the first time, causing a chaotic period of politics in Peninsular Malaysia that lasts to this day.
The period of chaos in Putrajaya has been amazingly bountiful for Kuching.
If Abang Jo’s predecessors always had to contend with a difficult Putrajaya that wielded an enormous amount of influence in Sarawak, Abang Jo only had to deal with a very weak and tame Putrajaya that would run to do Sarawak’s bidding if Sarawak so much as cleared its throat.
With Putrajaya becoming so weak due to infighting, Abang Jo has had no difficulty at all coming out looking like the champion of Sarawak during his seven-year reign. Every now and then, he or his cabinet ministers will say something to put down Putrajaya or be dismissive of the Peninsular politicians, but with their tails between their legs, the politicians in Putrajaya will ignore the slight and pretend like nothing happened.
That the politicians in Putrajaya now need Sarawak more than Sarawak needs them also means that Putrajaya has become somewhat of a wish-fulfilling genie for Sarawak, granting anything that Sarawak asks just to be on the right side of Sarawak.
While the past seven years have indeed been great for Abang Jo, something tells me that Zahid’s effusive praise of Abang Jo is a sign that, like everything in life, Abang Jo’s good fortune might be running out in the near future.
Although the political squabbles in Sarawak are not fought in the open like they are in Putrajaya, this does not mean there are no political problems in Sarawak.
As the proverb says, “Just because the waters are calm, it doesn’t mean there are no crocodiles lurking around.” Of all states, the land of Bujang Senang especially should know how true this proverb is.
Despite showing no signs of problems on the surface, make no mistake, there is most definitely a strong undercurrent of discontent running underneath the waters of Sarawak politics.
Sarawak, by its very structure, is a politically unstable state because it is the only state in the country that is ruled by a minority.
The biggest ethnic group in Sarawak are the Ibans, while Christianity is the largest religious grouping in Sarawak. Despite that, Sarawak has been ruled for decades by the minority Muslim Melanaus, who make up one of the smallest ethnicities in the state.
For comparison, imagine the undercurrent of discontent that a state like Penang or Kelantan would experience if Penang were ruled by Indians instead of the Chinese and Kelantan were ruled by the Chinese. That is the level of discontent that Sarawakians have been enduring for decades, to the point that talks of secession from the federation have only been getting louder over the years.
The main architect of the minority rule in Sarawak was probably its former YDP and longest-serving premier to date, Taib Mahmud, who died a couple of months ago.
Nobody knows precisely how Taib Mahmud arranged it so that a minority race in Sarawak managed to rule over the majority, but you do not need to be a rocket scientist to realize that he most likely achieved it by pursuing a tactic of divide and rule, underlined by all sorts of secret agreements, corrupt wheeling and dealing, and clandestine collusion between the powers that be.
We know this is true because it is an open secret that most of the ruling elites of Sarawak are inexplicably rich. Taib Mahmud himself is alleged to be not only the richest man in Malaysia but one of the richest men in the world, on account of arrangements he engineered to ensure that Sarawak remained under minority rule for decades.
After the unexpected and sudden death of Adenan Satem, who in the later part of his administration was showing signs that he was going to break free of the stranglehold of Taib Mahmud and create a legacy of his own, Taib Mahmud likely chose Abang Jo as the person to replace Adenan not because Abang Jo was the strongest politician in Sarawak, but because he was likely the weakest.
After facing the troublesome reign of Adenan, Taib no longer wanted a strong and independent-minded politician to become the premier of Sarawak. Hence, he likely chose Abang Jo as Adenan’s replacement, most likely because Abang Jo, being weak, unskilled, and untalented, was likely to yield to Taib’s bidding from behind the scenes.
Now that Taib Mahmud is out of the picture, however, it is unlikely that the stronger and more experienced politicians in Sarawak whom Taib Mahmud sidelined will abide by Abang Jo’s continuous reign in Sarawak.
Taib Mahmud also left a huge estate, with some estimating his wealth to be around USD 21 billion in 2012 alone, and his family was already engaged in a vicious dispute over his property even before he died. The fact that we are not hearing anything about how the dispute over Taib’s wealth is playing out is itself telling us about the level of politicking that the top echelons in Sarawak are engaged in behind the scenes.
Since Abang Jo is bereft of talent and skills, it is unlikely that he will be able to command anyone’s respect or admiration through his charisma and ability. At the end of the day, Abang Jo will only be able to retain his position for as long as he is able to provide the warlords whose support he requires to maintain power with enough spoils to quench their appetites.
For now, Abang Jo is probably able to quench the appetite of Sarawak’s warlords by extracting huge concessions from Putrajaya, but we must remember that being a warlord in a state like Sarawak, where the majority of people are discontent over being ruled by minorities, is an expensive affair.
Say what you want about Taib Mahmud, but he was a talented Machiavellian politician who could keep the costs down by not only paying off the Sarawakian warlords but eliminating potential enemies before they could gain enough strength to challenge his rule.
It is doubtful that Abang Jo has any such talents and skills.
Abang Jo’s challenger, who is almost certainly more skilled than him, is likely already scheming and preparing behind the scenes to make a move against Abang Jo when the timing is right.
For now, Abang Jo is useful because they are also profiting from the concessions that Abang Jo is extracting from Putrajaya.
However, listening to Zahid praise Abang Jo to high heaven a couple of days ago is somewhat making me feel that Abang Jo’s days are numbered.
The amount of concession that Abang Jo can extract from Putrajaya has probably reached its limits, and whoever Abang Jo’s opponents are, I have a feeling that they have already reached out to our own virtuoso Machiavellian politicians, Zahid and Anwar. Zahid is now praising Abang Jo for the same reason that Michael Corleone kissed Fredo in "The Godfather Part II '' – it is the kiss of death.
I have a feeling that trouble in Sarawak is going to blow out in the open soon, and Sarawak is soon no longer going to be the politically most stable state in Malaysia like Zahid praised it to be.
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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