What’s fragile and makes you cry?

State-level politics in Malaysia are now highly complicated by federal level alliances, not to mention those always power-hungry beings known as politicians. — 123rf.com

Glass Onion is both a 1968 song by the Beatles and a murder mystery that was released on Netflix in September 2022. They both have layers of complexity and create a lot of confusion, but at their core they are ultimately something quite simple – much like the political shenanigans happening in Malaysia’s state governments right now.

Over the first few weeks of January 2023, the Sabah state government has threatened to collapse, then assured the country of its stability, and eventually did collapse, only for everyone to rise up at the end asking, “What collapse?”

How did this happen? The answer is not that easy. The direct cause was the announcement by Sabah Barisan chairman Datuk Seri Bung Moktar Radin on Jan 6, 2023, that Barisan was pulling out of the state government. Bung Moktar, who is also Sabah Umno chief, said that Chief Minister Datuk Seri Hajiji Noor had lost his legitimacy after Hajiji led several assemblymen out of the Sabah Bersatu party to become direct members of the ruling GRS (Gabungan Rakyat Sabah) coalition on Dec 10, 2022; he is currently the coalition's chairman.

In the six days since Jan 6, as I'm writing this column, many things have happened, the most recent being Bung Moktar dropped as Sabah's deputy chief minister and as the state's works minister. In response, he said that the new Cabinet lineup announced by Hajiji on Jan 11 is not the unity government his party wants.

But Bung Moktar was replaced in that new Cabinet by Datuk Shahelmey Yahya who is also a member of Umno. And some reports allege that Bung Moktar would support Datuk Seri Mohd Shafie Apdal, the president of Warisan – a completely different party than Umno, mind you – as chief minister. So “what the party wants” obviously depends on who you talk to.

What exactly is the truth of the matter? Like the onion, there are so, so many layers to this, and peeling them makes your eyes water.

For a start, exactly who is on whose side? When the Sabah state elections were held in 2020, the winner was GRS, which included, among other parties, Umno and Sabah Bersatu. For those taking notes, at the federal level Umno is part of Barisan Nasional, and Sabah Bersatu is the state chapter of the nationwide Bersatu party.

However, the finely balanced federal election in 2022 made new bedfellows of old enemies. No single existing coalition won enough seats to claim the majority in Parliament, and in the end there needed to be an MOU, whose signatories included Pakatan Harapan, Barisan, GPS (Gabungan Parti Sarawak), GRS and Parti Warisan. Bersatu elected to remain in the Perikatan Nasional coalition, which now forms the Opposition.

So we have people who are friends at a federal level and enemies at a state level (or vice versa), which I’m sure led to a confusing situation when it came to deciding who should be accused of what (and probably when to do so).

It’s somewhat reminiscent of the movie Glass Onion where (mild spoilers ahead) everybody is suspect, and even who exactly the victims are is unclear. The movie makes you think you understand the story, and then midway through you realise it’s actually a different story, and all the way through you’re not sure which characters are telling the truth and which are lying. In the end, thanks to the chaos, everything gets broken, but at least the lead character is able to see clearly to the centre of it and figure out who the culprit is.

Except of course this is all fiction, and the havoc onscreen is just misdirection by the scriptwriter and director to make figuring out who is responsible for it all a tough task. It has to be confusing and full of misdirection because otherwise there is no mystery to unravel.

In the non-fictional world of Sabah politics, an attempt at clarity was made when party leaders from Putrajaya flew over to Sabah and basically told everybody, “You are the government, you are also the government, all of you are the government”. The proposed unity government was to include representatives from Pakatan, Umno and GRS, the plan being to align teammates at the federal level with those at the state level. Except that Bung Moktar – still Sabah Umno chief as I write this on Jan 12 – said that the two Umno members in Hajiji’s new Cabinet are not recognised by the party and cannot be said to represent Umno.

To what extent is the bluster really an attempt to make sense out of nonsense? Or is it really just adding more smoke to the fire?

To be fair, sometimes complexity is a byproduct of the characters involved. Rian Johnson, the director of Glass Onion, said as much when he talked about his work on The Last Jedi. When he was asked if he was trying to be clever and make that movie a commentary on the Star Wars franchise, his answer was, “First and foremost, it has to be an honest expression of what the characters are actually going through”.

Perhaps the key to understanding politics in Malaysia is to try and empathise with the people involved, and see whether their actions are an honest expression of what they are going through.

However, it’s unlikely that the current story about politicians will come to a clear conclusion, tied up in a neat bow. There will be six state elections in 2023 – in Kedah, Kelantan, Negri Sembilan, Penang, Selangor and Terengganu. Given that in Perak and Pahang we have Chief Ministers from parties that do not hold the majority of state seats, there is likely to be much room for refraction and reflection in the future to blur people’s intentions and objectives.

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In his fortnightly column, Contradictheory, mathematician-turned-scriptwriter Dzof Azmi explores the theory that logic is the antithesis of emotion but people need both to make sense of life’s vagaries and contradictions. Write to Dzof at [e-mail]. The views expressed here are entirely the writer's own.