The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.”

- Hannah Arendt

COMMENT | 2020 is a prelude to the shape of things to come. If you thought that this year was crummy, what we have to look forward to is the consequences of the pandemic and of course the coup, in 2021.

My top five news has always been an annual roundup of what I thought were the most important news items that were covered by the press and more often than not, what I consider “important” are news stories that are submerged in the news cycle but points to the dysfunctionality of the system.

I do think that 2020 is the culmination of the old maverick’s vision. The seeds he planted a long time ago are now the fruits of his labour, of his wayward political offspring, the vast bureaucracy, and the deep Islamic state.

Aided by the ineptitude of the opposition, what we have witnessed are the convulsions of the mainstream Malay political apparatus heightened by the vagaries a worldwide pandemic brings.

As Singapore’s Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan, said, “In fact, this is an acid test of every single country's quality of healthcare, standard of governance, and social capital. If any one of this tripod is weak, it will be exposed, and exposed quite unmercifully by this epidemic.”

While I depart from some of my fellow op-ed writers who claim that Malaysia failed miserably in handling the pandemic, the reality, is that this pandemic did reveal how we function as a society and the old demons which never left us. The following news stories, in no particular order, reflect the fault lines in our system that in my opinion were unmercifully exposed by this pandemic.

Ku Nan’s pocket change

Former federal territories minister Tengku Adnan Tengku Mansor’s rather cavalier...