I refer to the Malaysiakini report Chua: I'm the one in sex video .
Health Minister Dr Chua Soi Lek’s predicament poses these hard questions for Malaysians: can a public figure have a private life? Will his personal morality or his sexual profligacy have an impact on his discharge of political or official duties? Can public morality be separated from private morality?
To be sure, there will be many amongst us who will be of the opinion that a representative of the people, and a health minister at that, is supposed to set high standards of behaviour in public life as well as private life. For he not only represents the society but have also to lead it. He has to function as the role model for us and our kids.
I can therefore understand this argument: how can he, as health minister, lead a public campaign against Aids, which necessarily requires the dissemination of values of sexual conservatism and partner selectivity, if he carries the baggage of such a scandal? It is not as if his job as health minister was likely to involve campaign for the greater use of Viagra!
Having said that, I would personally like to see us Malaysians being able to look beyond a public official’s private morality.
His infraction is only a matter between him and his wife and family to resolve. It is none of our business. It becomes our business to ask him to go if he has defaulted in his competence as health minister by (let’s say) making insensitive comments on Baby Yok Shan’s issue; bungling the packaging of the Private Health Care Facilities & Services Act, running an inefficient healthcare system where ambulances cannot run on time for not having petrol, etc.
What has his consensual sexual relationship with a woman other than his wife got to do with his competence in the discharge of his duties as health minister? His wife and family may have an issue with that but do we? Even his personal arrogance is a better reason to ask him to go than this particular indiscretion.
This much I have to grant Chua Soi Lek - he is very courageous and forthright under very shameful circumstances to admit openly that he was the politician in the sex DVD and resign from all his posts. Just compare him with those caught in the other video clip on judicial appointment fixing, pussyfooting around with silence or protesting their innocence via proxy.
Unlike one ex-American president, he did not desecrate his work place by conducting an affair in it or make a false deposition on oath to Congress that he did not have sex because, citing biblical references, oral sex was not sex!
It is not that other public officials and politicians are particularly more disciplined. They were merely fortunate enough not to be caught with their pants down or even if caught, had the protection from the powers-that-be to bury the scandal. Chua was caught for being merely human and subject to the same foibles as the rest of us.
To force him to go by this episode alone is to indirectly reward and encourage by results dirty politics and tactics of perpetrators who would bring their political opponents down by illegal video-taping of their private lives including sexual relations. This brings Malaysian political morality and contestation to new depths.
Chua’s admission and resignation on his own accord poses a particular novel challenge to his boss, the PM. If he allows him to continue, people will ask what is this talk of Islamic values within the administration?
In this information age more than ever, more scandals will crop up as every public figure is subject to new electronic forms of visibility (video camera, camera phone, etc) disseminated instantaneously by the Internet to help generate ‘instantaneous’ public opinion.
