RETIRED federal minister Tan Sri Leo Moggie is to be commended for coming out with a book, From Longhouse to Capital: Recollections, which he stressed is no memoir but rather some recollections of his over 40 years as a public servant.
More retired Malaysian leaders must make it a point to put key decisions they have made while in office out for the public record — as Moggie has done in an eminently readable fashion — or otherwise, such personal perspectives germane to public discourse may be forever lost.
Moggie’s long career as a civil servant in Sarawak where he was a key aide to Datuk Tawi Sli, the second chief minister, a state minister under Tun Abdul Rahman Ya’kub, the third chief minister, and a federal minister under three prime ministers reads almost like the entirety of Sarawak’s and Malaysia’s post-Merdeka history.
At a time when Sarawak and Sabah are strongly asserting state rights and bewildering most other Malaysians in the process, Moggie offers perhaps unique, invaluable and quite balanced insights into what possibly animates this trend.
As likely the most prominent and well-educated Iban political leader of his generation, Moggie nevertheless counts as his major disappointment the failure to galvanise the Dayaks who collectively constitute some 45 per cent of Sarawak’s population into anything but “only a peripheral influence in the state’s political affairs”.
Such political disenchantment and disaffection felt by many Sarawak Dayaks is shared by many others in the state and is perhaps exacerbated by a widely-held perception that the Malay-dominated national ruling class had all along being working in cahoots with Malay/Muslim leaders in the state at the expense of the reasonable political aspirations of most other local Sarawakians.
Moggie would stake out — though not in so many words, I think — that such is mostly a misperception.
He intimated how while studying in New Zealand in 1965 he shared a disquiet felt by fellow Sarawak students on hearing first-hand Lee Kuan Yew arguing forcefully for a “Malaysian Malaysia”.
“Inflexible reliance on meritocracy is a sure way of condemning those not provided with the necessary background to remain marginalised,” wrote Moggie, demolishing the idea that Singapore’s leaving had been strictly over a Malay-Chinese political disagreement.
While Moggie faulted Tunku Abdul Rahman for being somewhat ham-fisted in declaring an emergency that ended with Tan Sri Stephen Kalong Ningkan dismissed as chief minister in 1966, he nevertheless pointed out that the Tunku — still nominally prime minister in the aftermath of May 13, 1969 — pointed out to Rahman Ya’kub, then about to become chief minister, an earlier political understanding that the positions of Sarawak governor and chief minister cannot be simultaneously monopolised by a single community.
Perhaps the best chance Moggie personally had to ward off the Dayaks’ “peripheral influence” came during the so-called Ming Court crisis of 1987 that pitted Rahman Ya’kub against Tun Taib Mahmud, then incumbent chief minister.
Moggie, who led Parti Bansa Dayak Sarawak (PBDS), sided with Rahman Ya’kub and brought it to its best ever performance, securing 15 seats in the snap state election called by Taib.
Rahman Ya’kub did not hold up to his end of the political bargain, winning a mere five seats to allow Taib to cling to a bare majority of 28 seats. Moggie said he had mistakenly counted on Tan Sri Leonard Linggi Jugah, the Iban leader in Taib’s Parti Pesaka Bumiputera Bersatu, to defect.
PBDS, unfortunately, did not survive beyond Moggie’s political retirement in 2004. It was deregistered amidst a messy succession battle, with strong hints of one party faction working towards just such an outcome to allow a successor party to take its place.
Moggie ruefully ruminated: “Observers will probably conclude that the chequered role played by the Dayak community in the shifting sands of Sarawak politics in the last 50 years has, by and large, been self-inflicted.”
Notwithstanding his disappointments with Sarawak politics, Moggie played pivotal roles in various ministerial capacities at national level. Throughout Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s 22-year first stint as prime minister, Moggie’s imprint is felt in the review, reform and transformation of such key sectors as power, telecommunications, posts and highways.
He was also instrumental in Dr Mahathir’s international outreach, particularly to Africa.
Moggie concluded his recollections somewhat wistfully: “The lens of this retired politician and traveller from a rural longhouse in Sarawak to the capital Kuala Lumpur, with much experience gathered along the way, sees our narrative as confined and narrow, one that promotes a particular sectarian view of Malaysia. Malaysia was never meant to be like this.”
John Teo views developments in the nation, the region and the wider world from his vantage point in Kuching, Sarawak