One awarded a contract, whatever it is for – armaments, traffic lights, food packs for soldiers, purchase of aircraft, stationery, toothpicks – to whomsoever paid him the most. As a result, projects failed. No one bothered to check it for fear that this would redound on them. And redound on them it will. It is not forgotten that Tun Mahathir Mohamed's one public act of spite – the humiliation of his deputy, Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim – is now standard fare on the Internet to bring those in power down. You need only ask Dato' Seri Musa Aman, about it. Should you not know who he is, he is known also as Dato' Seri Musa Aman Khan, chief minister of Sabah, Jennifer Marcus's spouse (as a death notice in a Sabah newspaper referred to him). He accuses all those who question his arrogant running of the state as being cyber terrorists. But these cyber terrorists do so because Tun Mahathir gave them the opening, to look under the blankets, so to speak, to highlight the political and other follies of their elected leaders. He should tick off Tun Mahathir instead. And since those who should rein him in, look the other way, I am afraid he must answer the allegations against him. And he had better be truthful

DATO' SERI ABDULLAH AHMAD Badawi, should be on top of the world. He led the National Front (BN) to its best ever electoral showing four months after he succeeded Tun Mahathir Mohamed as prime minister in November 2004. Two months later, he was elected unopposed as UMNO president. On paper, he had more power, and control, of Malaysia, UMNO and BN than any of his predecessors. But he is not at peace. His writ does not run, unless enforced with a whip. The state UMNO chiefs defy him with impunity. His cabinet is split. His deputy prime minister and deputy UMNO president, Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak, is in revolt, after Pak Lah's advisers decided he had to be cut down to size to protect their leader; and he, not to be undone, is on the offensive. The two men are bitter political rivals, but challenge so amaterurishly that it beggars belief.

UMNO leaders up and down the country watch this confrontation in ill-disguised delight. It does not matter if they back either, or the warlords in the states: a fight amongst the leaders gives them unexpectedly more power. The other aspect of this is unmentioned and for the moment unmentionable: behind Dato' Seri Najib stands the still formidable former prime minister, Tun Mahathir Mohamed. This political confrontation between Pak Lah and Dato' Seri Najib is more serious than is assumed. There is little love lost between the two camps, and both believe their chances are better if Dato' Seri Anwar tilts in their direction. Notwithstanding that he could ever, nor want to, return to UMNO.

The Malaysian political system has been in catharsis since 1988 when the prime minister, Dr Mahathir Mohamed, in political vengeance, destroyed, as president of Umno the mass movement and replaced it with Umno the political party. It did well for a decade because it was held together by one man, Anwar Ibrahim, the then deputy prime minister and Umno deputy president. When he was sacked, humiliated and jailed, Umno fell apart. If he was not, Umno would have survived intact a while longer. The Malay would give his life for Umno the mass movement but not for Umno the political party. That Anwar is now in revolt against Umno splits the Malay community in cultural confusion. The non-Umno parties in BN is similarly split within themselves as Umno, and are deadweight to Umno.

When politicians order their official lives in deceit, foul play, arrogance, they can hang on to power so long as they can wield the whip. Dr Mahathir did until he could no longer. We know who caused that: the former deputy prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim. Today's failing and falling UMNO and, by extension, BN is traced to his political destruction in UMNO. It defied feudal rules. The Malay community splintered. The rump behind Umno lost all reason and used the whip. But the whiplash can no longer keep them in line.

It is more prosaic than that. Diplomacy is ignored. Friendships and policies are not kept in good repair. Embassies are mere post boxes, with diplomats at a loss and often confined to their compounds, talking to each other and other diplomats, not building bridges in the country they are accredited to. There is, I dare say, but a handful in Wisma Putra who could call a senior official anywhere to discuss a pressing problem. Foreign policy now resides in the Prime Minister's office, not in Wisma Putra. For an active foreign policy, hard work and long hours are a prequisite. The good will we had is all but destroyed during the Mahathir years. For matters to improve we must have a more dynamic, intelligent and forward-looking foreign minister than the bumbler in our midst.

The non-Malay parties from the peninsula in the BN coalition, having for so long clung to UMNO's coattails, are in terror for what is to come if this infighting in UMNO turns into a political civil war; but those from Sarawak and Sabah, Muslim and non-Muslim, native and Malay, sharpen their knives to forestall any federal attempts to impose its will or crush their demands for a more localised polity. There is no public talk of it, the media here are famously known for only a sanitised view through the rosy spectacles of the UMNO president. Few Malaysians therefore will even consider that all is not right. They do not believe the UMNO supreme council is full of men and women back the former president Mahathir Mohamed, not his successor Pak Lah.

For it got subsumed in the UMNO pastime of eating alive its leaders. The new UMNO president took it on him to erase all that his predecessor stood for. So Tengku Abdul Rahman, for all his national following, was seen by his successors, as an anachronism of all they stand for, and irrelevant as a pillar of state. Tun Mahathir Mohamed fights a rear-guard action, which he cannot win, to secure his immediate place in history. He rewrote history as thoroughly to erase all vestiges of his predecessors' place in post-independence history, and finds his successor's similar attempt galling, and retaliates. But he will fail.

What it reveals is a dysfunctional BN government, frozen in terror of what may happen, in near rigor mortis when the former UMNO deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim, after his release from prison, quickly takes over as a politician who knows what he does, raises issues and possible solutions with a verve not seen even during the Mahathir years. What he says is mundane, run of the mill, nothing new but he says it loudly and clearly. Instead of taking him on, UMNO leaders take fright and mumble incoherently. When he plays his political games, like his call on Pak Lah during Hari Raya, UMNO is in shell shock. The deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak, rushes to mend his fences against what he sees as a redoubled Pak Lah effort to destroy him. But Pak Sheikh has no desire to rejoin the UMNO from he was ignominiously expelled or be a part of the insane political mudfights its leaders are engaged in.

Malaysia should have chosen its former prime minister, Dr Mahathir Mohamed, or current deputy premier Najib Razak as its negotiator. Instead, Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi has filled in. He should not have.

His detractors insist he is a chameleon, a charlatan. If he was, how could he climb up the Umno ladder to be within spitting distance of being prime minister after Dr Mahathir Mohamed?

Who suffered politically and culturally was not Pak Sheikh but his tormentors, chief among whom was the former prime minister, Tun Mahathir Mohamed. His political stake rose by the day as UMNO's declined. Curiously, UMNO cannot reverse itself for two reasons its leaders insist does not matter: Pak Sheikh, who is not only an expelled UMNO member but one who would never be re-admitted; and corruption, by whatever name, which UMNO leaders aver does not exist in it. But these two reasons which frightens UMNO no end.

THE PAHANG MENTRI BESAR, Dato' Seri Adnan Yaakob, now rewrites the Malaysian constitution: the sultan must consult and accept the advise of the state government on all matters but the award of honours and titles. The 1983 constitutional amendments made the rulers constitutional monarchs handmaidens to political power. The man who engineered that, the then prime minister, Tun Mahathir Mohamed, wanted to transfer the native inherent powers of the sultans – the awarding of honours and titles was one – to political power. But it was flawed ab initio, though no one would admit it then. What got everyone's goat at the time was of a sultan attackiing a drunk hockey coach who appeared before him as the Inspector-General of Police a decade-and-a-half later attacked a manacled and blindfolded deputy prime minister. The amendments were passed, the Yang Dipertuan Agung signed it over the objections of the sultans, which he cannot when it involves their rights and privileges as rulers. But it became the law of the land.

The same refrain was seen in India in the mid-1960s when the Congress Party underwent a similar transformation. Ten years later, a non-Congress government was formed in New Delhi. On hindsight, Anwar in Umno was its best bet. Umno the political party had two widwives: Dr Mahathir Mohamad and Anwar. When Anwar was expelled, Umno lost its verve and confidence; Mahathir and his merry band since rushing hither and thither to keep Umno from tipping over. Now that he is back in politics, it is the worse.

This worked so long as Umno delivered what it promised. Which in time, it could not. The Malay ground rebelled when Dr Mahathir Mohamad acceded as prime minister, and Umno president, in 1981. He reworked the rules to sideline the rebels.

Which is why UMNO has now decided to eat its words and ask the police and anti-corruption agency to investigate incidents of bribery and corruption. It did so because Pak Lah and his group cannot dominate UMNO, not when the deputy president and deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak, and his secret patron, the former prime minister, Tun Mahathir Mohamed, forestall him at every turn. Pak Lah acts belatedly to control the damage. He loses control of UMNO by the day, and he must begin to remove the obstacles on his way to be an effective UMNO president and Malaysian prime minister. Would he succeed? Possibly not. He is not prepared to act firmly. Look at his campaign on corruption. It is, to all intents and purposes, dead. He dared not act against the 18 'big fish' his government said are known and proven corrupters, after a minor Sabah politician with no political future in his cabinet, and a crony business man, were charged in court. Rumours have it that two of the 18 are a prominent cabinet minister and his wife.

Since tens of thousands or more benefit from this gravy train – that is what it boils down to – this belief in one's own invincibility is a political article of faith. But this is challenged. The National Front coalition is not invincible as it once was. For that to be, the Malay community must accept UMNO as its cultural and political leader. For 31 years, until 1987, it did. But the president of the day, one Tun Mahathir Mohamed, felt the ungrateful UMNO wretches did not accept him as president for life, and when his election as president that year was challenged, decided to let UMNO be declared illegal. The courts did the work for him, but the result was one that gladdened his heart. He could now be president for life, and he could keep out of his reborn UMNO those who could disturb the peace by challenging him. Every change in the party rules was not to benefit the members but how he could be returned unopposed as party president. Two strains developed from this: those who wanted to be in politics where the rules are not bent opted out of it altogether or joined the only other Malay political party extant, PAS.

It does not matter who they are: engineers, civil servants, lawyers, NGOs, social climbers, business men, poliicians. Lest I be tarred Islamophobic for referring to some Malaysian Muslims as Pavlov's dogs, Dr Ivan Pavlov experimented with dogs in Russia in the late nineteenth century when he firmed his theory. Marshall MacLuhan extended this further in advertising and got consumers to buy what they did not want. But the followers of Islam in Malaysia are conditioned, like Pavlov's dogs, when they react in heat to canine idioms on humans. Look at the furore when a Singapore newspaper described the former Prime Minister, Tun Mahathir Mohamed, top dog. I wish I could call them Pavlov's cats or other Islamically suited animals, but it was dogs he experimented with. But when they react to every non-Muslim's description of them in idiomatic, though not in Islamic political correctness, English, they are indeed as conditioned as Pavlov's dogs.

It forgot however that much had changed amongst his supporters. A powerful icon in jail, he is now caught in fractious infighting for his political soul which could damage his political persona. Those who suffered for him – many undoubtedly did – now want repayment in the form of being the aides they were at the time of his political problems. But the Anwar that was sacked is not the Anwar today. His political and personal views have undergone a catharsis; his arrogance has tempered to a mildness one never thought possible; he has not lost the fire in his belly, but he has shaken off from the UMNO culture that once threatened to marginalise him as his nemesis, Tun Mahathir Mohamed, is today. But those fighting for his soul does not seem to have understood it. Nor, it must be said, those in the government.

THE PRIME MINISTER, DATO Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, ends his first year in officer weaker than he began. What he set out to do, to chart his own course and shake off suggestions that he is but his predecessor, Tun Mahathir Mohamed's ventriloquist dummy, he has yet to begin as he juggles a political career between the needs of his place in history and the pressures of a resilient political opposition within his own ranks. No one but his own advisers believed it would be easy. But the political spin of his administration, all of which is taken as the gospel, by Malaysia's uncritical and sycophantic mainstream media and what passes for its intellegentsia, and the middle class, begins with each passing day to be cloaked in fantasy. Far from the ventriloquist dummy, he is fast becoming a creature of his own insouciance and ever so firmly trapped within the poilitical forces this unleashed.

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