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The MCA and the triads: The Prime Minister steps in

THE NEW MCA PRESIDENT, DATO' SERI Ong Ka Ting, is caught in his self-deluding web of untruths, halftruths, evasions, lies and deception. He must come clean, but he would not. He lets others speak for him. Including the Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed, who rushed to his defence, blaming a newspaper for revealing much information on the shadowy ties between Dato' Seri Ong and two politically active triad leaders in Penang and Selangor. First he stonewalled any move to suspend or expel the Penang man, Ong King Ee aka Jackie Chan. After all, he has no police record, although he was allegedly involved in a shootout at a wedding in Alor Star, had been in preventive detention in Johore, and is said to lead a triad in Penang known as "Sio Sam Ong" (Three Little Emperors), with drugs, kidnapping, murder and robbery. We are now told the police have no clue to its reputed leader! Then he suspends him.

Now Jackie Chan, whom the police would like to have a word with and is a few steps behind his flight, sends a fax to the MCA in Penang to resign from the party. The Penang MCA chairman, Dato' Wong Kam Hoong, is so cockahoop about it that he informs the press even before he has seen the fax. "I was told Ong had faxed a letter he was resigning as chairman of Gurney Drive MCA branch and as a party member," he said, adding he learnt of it by telephone in Alor Star where he was on party business. He did not know anything else about the matter. What is the next course of action? The MCA follows the rules scrupulously. Did you not know that? Jackie Chan resigns from the party. Now the Penang MCA will submit it to its central committee, which will of course decide if it should be accepted or rejected. In other words, all he is interest in is a smokescreen to protect the MCA president.

It does not stop there. Dr Mahathir now blames an UMNO-controlled newspaper, The Malay Mail, for the mess Dato' Seri Ong Ka Ting is in. But could the Malay Mail have done the expose if it did not have the nod from UMNO leaders? Does this mean that within UMNO also has a Team A and Team B, like in UMNO, Gerakan, MCA, MIC? Yes. The National Front (BN) is a collection of political parties with no aim now but to cling to office at any cost, with individual party presidents believing in the divine right of kings to hold office for life. The parties therefore are split on irrelevant issues. In almost every BN party, the presidents do not think the deputies they chose are fit to succeed them. So, what the party's activities invariably is a variation of how to dump its president. So what happens in the MCA is not new. It is how the party succession is decided in every BN party.

The Prime Minister stepped in because he has common cause with the Team A leaders of BN parties. He would rather have some one other than Dato' Seru Abdullah Ahmad Badawi as his successor, since Pak Lah was in the Team B of UMNO at the time of its demise in 1988. The UMNO we know of is officially UMNO Baru (New UMNO), even if the Baru is dropped to tell the world nothing has changed. The MCA took a leaf from UMNO when it sidelined the Team B leaders after Dato' Seri Ong was nominated president. When the Semangat '46, the UMNO Team B, dissolved and rejoined UMNO, great care was taken to isolate all of them from party positions; only those prepared to grovel could hold office. Pak Lah and Dato' Seri Rais Yatim included.

When party politics swirls around an out-of-touch leader, the wider raison d'etre of its existence is forgotten; only that he should be given pride of place, with the profile higher as the party loses its influence within the BN and amongst its members. Which is why no BN party has a long term view which it works towards. It puts spurious policy positions which it has no intention to carry out, and quickly forgotten when something else catches its fancy. It works when the BN is in absolute control. But it is not. UMNO and its members are at loggerheads, with the Malay community it represents hopelessly divided amidst a great cultural hurt which it cannot yet repair. So long as the Anwar Ibrahim affair remains unresolved, this would continue. And every BN party has a similar built-in self-destructive conundrum it has to come to terms with.

What we see is a breakdown of the BN. It can hold on to office because it is in office. But the cracks are evident. When Pak Lah taunted PAS this week that it was daydreaming about capturing Kedah in the next general elections, he reflected an uncertainty that crept into UMNO and BN after the Anwar Ibrahim affair. The BN in recent years has lurched from crisis to crisis, in which one party after another plays out its crisis in public. It believes that that is proof of democracy and good governance in the party. It is not. It shows how out of touch the parties are in the wide world outside. There is a new generation of Malaysians which does not adhere to the founding principles they are told to honour when the leaders deliberate downgrade them for personal gain or power. They are told they must do as the leaders say not as they do. And are not prepared to. That is the danger which the BN parties are not prepared to address. Or if they do, do not know how except to crack down hard on those who disagree.

For too long, the BN assumed that absolute power offset the need to govern. All that was needed was to announce policies, often without thought, and it would be done. As it comes under political and other pressure, the pronouncements and projects increase. Today it is rare for a cabinet minister to announce a project that is less than a billion ringgit. Where is the money coming from? Does it matter? These announcements are, in its view, more important than parliamentary approval or a bankrupt treasury. So the excitement is provided by such arguments as if the MCA president does, or does not, go to bed with triads. Nothing is resolved except the venality inherent in a government in office for nearly five decades. And with that its crowding irrelevance in elections to come.

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@mgg.pc.my