IT WASN’T A good week for Malaysia. A disappeared plane and an imminently disappearing opposition leader have placed the country bang at the centre of the international stage in unprecedented fashion and it’s unlikely Malaysia’s leaders will welcome the attention.
Flight MH370 lost radar contact barely an hour after takeoff last Saturday and its fate is still unknown, in what is unfurling as one of the 21st century’s most intriguing (and tragic) mysteries.
The fate of Malaysia’s opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim of the PKR alliance is perhaps easier to gauge. His sensational reconviction on a previously dropped sodomy charge by a Malaysian appeals court a day before MH370 went missing bars him from standing for office just ahead of the district election he was due to contest in on March 23.
He’s been bailed on appeal and his wife will stand for election in his place, but prison beckons. Anwar was freed from a controversial nine-year sentence for sodomy in 2004 when his conviction was overturned after he had served six years in prison.
In the meantime, journalists unused to covering Malaysia have been gobsmacked by what they regard as the procedural incompetence of the country’s authorities in response to the missing Boeing 777. Not to mention the risible performances put on by Malaysia’s representatives in official press conferences on the matter.
Powerful authority figures rarely embrace being mocked for doing their job badly, although the impression a self-deprecating sense of humour is assumed to be a job requirement for Western political leaders (senior ministers in the UK, for instance, accept a pelting with eggs as a potentially cheery occupational hazard – without having to demand the head of the perpetrator in return).
Powerful authority figures rarely embrace being mocked for doing their job badly
NOT SO THE Malaysians. Nor, for that matter, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who takes himself rather seriously. And I’m sure Mr Putin was frowning last week.
I’ll bet he is terribly miffed that an international airspace drama which could be straight out of Hollywood and is playing out in Asia has robbed him of the headlines during a week when he has massed his troops on the Ukrainian border. He may yet grab the headlines by ordering those troops into action.
The pomposity with which politicians approach their jobs when they have little to fear about their power base calls to mind Bertholt Brecht’s “Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui” and all its absurdist references to a small gangsterish man trying with all his might to control the 1930s cauliflower trade in Chicago.
Puffed-up pomp at the highest levels of elected office might often seem inevitable but flagrant incompetence is not. The reputation of Malaysia’s high-level public authorities has been dealt a severe blow by the debacle of the missing plane.
Malaysia has found itself in the maelstrom of a public relations disaster that will probably end up as a case study, depending of course on how the authorities respond. A good bit of crisis management education will no doubt have been dished out to the talking heads by some expensive PR agencies as the negative global press rolls on.
AS FOR MALAYSIA Airlines, well good luck with that one. The company’s stock dived last week as the crisis unfolded, losing 18% at one point as the news of the disappeared plane hit the wires.
Customers have been deserting the airline for years as the local start-up Air Asia and other budget carriers have eaten into its bottom line, forcing a string of debt restructurings. Its parent’s aborted 2005 bond issue was no walk in the park, either.
One can only assume that if the PR fallout from the MH370 story is sufficiently dire to severely strain Malaysia Airlines’ commercial viability, the country’s government stands ready to provide support.
It did the same when Malaysian construction group Ranhill suffered a severe cash squeeze thanks to the full realisation of the absurd concentration risk the company had taken on via a huge housing project on the outskirts of Tripoli, the capital of Libya.
The demise of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the resultant emergency evacuation of Ranhill’s workers from that project and its subsequent dereliction pushed the company to the brink, but the largesse of the Malaysian government forestalled the company’s collapse, and bondholders went away satisfied.
Some will see Anwar Ibrahim as Malaysia’s Hamlet railing heroically against a rotten state. Whatever happens to him, the truth, if you’re a Malaysia Airlines’ creditor, is that the state in question at least has deep enough pockets to come to the rescue.