The Magic of the Walking Stick

 

In the second year of my eighties, for my birthday, my daughter presented me with a walking stick, a Malacca Cane, with a polished wooden knob and a bronze collar beneath the knob. The cane not only steadied my walk and gave me a hold to haul myself up from low chairs, but it also became a pole to vault me across open drains that crisscrossed the streets and pavements.

On the streets, you are seldom noticed. Everyone is going somewhere or returning from somewhere, stopping only to cross a street or for a bus that is always too early or too late. The world shrinks to individuals and shows itself only as parts of a garment not properly tucked away.  The crowded pavement is no place for contemplation or consideration. Individual purpose blurs the world, obscuring the meandering beggar, or the man with the walking stick. The individual retreats into himself; everyone is an island that is moving.

But the wet market is another world. Under its high steel rafters, vendors standing behind tiled stalls draw attention ceaselessly to what they sell: vegetables, fish, chicken, and meat. Everyone is looking, touching, and probing the goods before a purchase. Conversations are shouted across the stalls. It is a place of incessant bargaining, a lively theatre of haggling that you never find in the sterile aisles of a supermarket.

There is no isolation in the wet market; everyone is noticed or demands to be noticed. Even the infant lying in a crib under a stall is bawling for attention. Transactions split the market world into myriad fragments awaiting connection for the sale after the haggling.

Yet, the moment the cane appeared, the rhythm changed. A silence enveloped my presence. Shoppers moved aside, offering their hands in support. There was no haggling at the stalls. Instead of the usual tussle over price, the vendors took it upon themselves to choose the finest produce they had to offer. They discounted the prices without my asking, and they carefully arranged the goods into bags tied specifically to be easy to carry. When they saw my hands were full, the transaction didn't end at the counter. One or two of the workers would leave their stalls to carry the bags all the way to my car. When I offered a tip, they brushed it away with a smile, leaving me with the strange, humbling feeling that by allowing them to help, it was I who had done them the favour.

I have walked the market for more than fifty years, from the time it was built. I was pushed, shoved, and slipped more than once on the slippery floor. I had witnessed generational changes of children helping at the stall, taking over as they grew up. Familiar faces disappeared, and new ones were added, but there was seldom time to inquire about the people I knew who were no longer there. Then, on the first day with my cane, I saw the kindness that was always there.

It is a striking irony of aging that a tool designed to support my declining physical strength became the very instrument that revealed the enduring strength of human kindness.

An Independent Body to Oversee Higher Education

Malaysia's Ministry of Higher Education is considering establishing an independent council or panel to review university appointments, management decisions, and operational administration. 

Deputy Higher Education Minister Adam Adli Abd Halim announced this proposal in the Dewan Rakyat on 4 November 2026 as a key component of the upcoming One Higher Education Act (OHEA), which is slated to replace the decades-old Universities and University Colleges Act 1971 (AUKU). While the precise terms and structure of the proposal remain difficult to discern from available media reports, the following synthesis attempts to make coherent sense of the announced initiative.

 Key Functions of the Proposed Panel 

According to the statement delivered during the parliamentary question-and-answer session, the independent body is being examined to introduce a system of checks and balances as public universities transition toward greater autonomy. Its scope would include reviewing:

University appointments and leadership selections;

Administrative and management operations, to prevent arbitrary institutional pressure on staff; and

Academic affairs, including the independence of course and programme offerings.

Broader Context of Academic Freedom Reforms 

Beyond Employer-Employee Dynamics:   

Adam Adli emphasised that the OHEA aims to accord a distinct legal status to academics. This structural shift ensures their role is recognised beyond a basic employer-employee relationship, safeguarding their right to research and teach without administrative retaliation.

Consolidation of Restrictive Laws:   

The ministry is currently reviewing seven separate pieces of higher education legislation to align them under the new OHEA framework. This includes examining the Statutory Bodies (Discipline and Surcharge) Act 2000 (Act 605), which has traditionally been used to restrict public statements and policy criticisms by university lecturers.

Immediate Interim Protections:   

While the structural and legal framework of the new independent panel is being finalised, the ministry implemented an immediate directive effective 27 August. All public universities have been ordered to immediately halt disciplinary proceedings against students and staff related to freedom of expression, public criticism, or participation in peaceful assemblies.

As to this, please read an opinion published in this Blog;

https://privateeducationmalaysia.blogspot.com/2026/09/mohe-relaxes-disciplinary-actions-but.html

The Deputy Minister said that the repeal and replacement of AUKU will be executed in a planned, phased manner to avoid administrative or legal gaps in the governance of Malaysia's public higher education institutions.

Conclusion 

The proposal for an independent oversight panel is not without precedent. It echoes an earlier reform proposal: the Maszlee Committee (2019), established during Dr Maszlee Malik's tenure as Education Minister, which similarly contemplated creating a buffer body to mediate between the government and universities. The buffer body model—widely practised in jurisdictions such as the United Kingdom, India, and New Zealand—is designed to place funding, monitoring, and strategic oversight in the hands of subject-matter experts rather than career civil servants or ministers, thereby insulating institutional governance from direct political intervention while preserving public accountability.

The Maszlee-initiated discussions, however, unfolded against a backdrop of stalled reforms and resistance within the administrative apparatus, and the buffer-body proposal never fully materialised, ultimately dying with the change of government that followed.

The current OHEA initiative thus offers a second opportunity to translate that vision into concrete institutional design. Whether the proposed panel ultimately functions as a genuine buffer—with real authority over appointments, funding, and academic affairs—or merely as an advisory appendage to ministerial power will determine whether Malaysia's higher education governance undergoes meaningful structural change or merely a rebranding of existing controls.

 

The new tyranny: The road to a lawful world has collapsed

 Power is no longer bound by rules, and too many of us are cheering.

The news arrived in two parts, hours apart.

First, from Oslo: the Nobel Committee awarded its 2026 Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, a former judge of the International Criminal Court (ICC). It honoured her work for international law at what the citation called “a time when judges and institutions of international law are under political attack.”

Then came the answer from the US. Sweeping sanctions were imposed on the court itself – its resources to be cut off, its operations crippled. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio dismissed it as a “rogue court”.

The ICC described the measures as “an assault on the rule of law and the foundations of the international legal order.”

I am no political scientist. I am writing this as someone who reads the news late at night and then cannot sleep. What I felt reading those two headlines was not outrage. It was a kind of cold confirmation.

A court built to hold the powerful to account was being punished for exactly that. The punishment was timed to mock the very idea that the law might bind the strong.

I was born at the end of World War Two. After the trenches and the camps and Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world did something unprecedented. It wrote down rules:

The UN Charter.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, which declared that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.

The Genocide Convention.

The Nuremberg trials, which established that even heads of state could be tried.

The promise was simple and enormous. It declared that from then on, power would be bound by law and sovereignty would be equal. We would be citizens of a world and not merely subjects of whoever held the biggest guns.

For the first time in history, there was a road to a civilised existence.

The road has collapsed

That road has collapsed. In my own lifetime, I have watched the signposts come down.

A sitting head of state abducted from his own capital by a foreign army.

Gaza reduced to rubble while court orders were simply ignored.

Iran bombed in an unprovoked attack.

Venezuela blockaded, its tankers seized by force.

The Americas (what Washington calls the Western Hemisphere) declared, openly, to be America’s sphere of influence.

Institutions of accountability defunded, delegitimised and blacklisted.

Each act justified as necessity. Each violation met with a shrug dressed up as realism.

Cheering crowds

What frightens me most is not the powerful. It is the crowds.

Every time a line is crossed, there are people cheering – not a few cranks, who could be shrugged off, but millions.

They cheer when a court is humiliated, when a city is flattened, when a leader is dragged away in chains. They cheer not because they have weighed the evidence, but because the violator wears their colours.

Reason has become a football tournament. We are no longer a world of citizens. We have become a world of fans.

Underneath the cheering is something worse: helplessness.

I can vote, but it changes little. Sanctions, wars and surveillance run through executive orders, secret agencies and private contractors that no ballot reaches.

I can protest; I am a nuisance. I can organise; I am monitored. I am told information has never been freer; yet the news arrives pre-framed, pre-angered, pre-divided.

I know something terrible is happening, and I cannot touch it. I am a spectator to my own future. And it is a future I would rather not see.

And I do believe this is a countdown. When law is treated as an obstacle, force is the only arbiter left.

There are too many flashpoints now – Venezuela, Iran, Gaza, Ukraine, Taiwan, the South China Sea, Korea – for all of them to stay contained.

Add climate collapse, cyber-attacks, resource wars and machines that can begin a war faster than a human can stop it.

A nuclear exchange would not simply kill millions. It would poison the soil, break the supply chains, and end the connected civilisation that ordinary people depend on.

Those who would suffer most are those with the least say: workers, families, migrants, refugees, the poor. As always.

What can one person do?

Consider Navi Pillay. Born in apartheid South Africa, she became the first non-white woman to open her own law firm in the Natal province (now KwaZulu-Natal). She defended activists and prisoners when the law itself was designed to deny them equality.

She became a judge, and then president of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. There, she helped establish the principle that rape and sexual violence can constitute genocide.

She sat on the International Criminal Court. She served as the UN’s top human rights official. In 2025 she chaired the UN inquiry that concluded Israel had committed genocide in Gaza.

And in October 2026, the Nobel Committee awarded her the Peace Prize for a lifetime spent enlarging the reach of international law.

Her life is proof that one person, working through institutions and refusing to look away, can change what the law is capable of.

She did not stop a war. But she made accountability possible. That is not nothing. It is the difference between a world with rules and a world without them. 

Not nothing.

I can refuse to cheer. I can refuse to wear the colours of any empire, including the one that claims to speak for me.

I can keep alive the memory of what was promised: the Charter, the Declaration, Nuremberg. The powerful depend on us forgetting those rules ever existed.

I can bear witness, write it down, pass it on.

I can act locally, in solidarity with the vulnerable on my own street. I can reach across borders to others doing the same. The only counterweight to a tyranny of the few is a solidarity of the many.

It is thin. It is not enough to stop a war. But it is the difference between being a spectator and being complicit.

The road that collapsed was built once, by ordinary people who had just lived through hell. It can be built again. That is the only hope I have, and I am holding on to it.