MGG Pillai Commentary View

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The BN needs, but does not yet have, RM3.5 bn for the General Election

THE NATIONAL FRONT (BN) FINANCES are in a mess. It does not have funds on its own, only what its member parties allot for its running and when elections are around. In elections past, funds were aplenty. There was more than enough to manage elections, and the the odd inevitable pilfering of millions of ringgit. Now party leaders control the finances with no checks and balances, with the inevitable consequence of billions of ringgit that should be in the books are not. UMNO, for instance, has not presented its accounts for nearly two decades, sidestepping the issue at every general assembly under a fiction that the UMNO supreme council would pass it. But even that body has not had a chance to scrutinise it. The accounts were never presented to it. It is the same in every BN party. The BN's belief it can do as it likes, the money would flow in like water, and victory would be seized from the jaws of defeat.

The underlying confidence is no more. Tun Mahathir Mohamed is not in control; Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi is. But he does not control the UMNO finances. How could he when they are in a mess, and final accounts have yet to be presented? The Treasury is empty. If election funds had been collected for the coming elections until Pak Lah took over - one RM1 billion election donation is, I am told, missing; no one seems to know where it has disappeared to - they are not available to him. Tun Mahathir, with his deft use of the carrot and the stick, got the power brokers in UMNO to stump out what he needed. Pak Lah, fighting for his political life and uncertain in the face of UMNO warlords, can but plead for the funds. Similar pressures face the other BN parties. The MCA, for instance, is put on notice by Chinese business men and guild leaders that funds would be given only if the MCA demands more seats in Parliament and the state assemblies, and address the issues that divide the Chinese community. In other words, the MCA should give practical proof that it has the community's interests at heart.

Under the BN's predecessor, the Alliance, not only did each individual member party but every power source - cabinet ministers, mentris besar - had their separate election funds. When an election was due, each contributed what each must, for a healthy election fund. But three decades ago, when the BN had succeeded the Alliance, this system was rudely abrogated for no reason than to break the power of the then (and now the late) Dato' Harun Idris, who was then politically destroyed as UMNO has failed to destroy its former deputy president, Dato' Seri Ånwar Ibrahim. The man who orchestrated this was the then UMNO deputy president, Tun Hussein Onn, who went on to be UMNO president and Malaysian Prime Minister. He invited the UMNO supreme council members to his house, saw each of them separately and asked them to declare their political funds. He made sure they did not meet the others to warn them of what he demanded. The sums he wrested from them were so large that he had them invested in the United Kingdom, admitting in rare moment of candour in his retirement that the interest on that amount was more than what UMNO needed to finance the 1978 General Election.

But because much of what happens in BN is not thought out, no effort was made to prevent the power brokers - who in the regime of Pak Lah transform into warlords - from amassing an election fund over which the centre now has no control. With elections around the corner, the BN seeks desperately for funds for it. How much does it need? BN officials estimate it at RM3,000 a voter in a parliamentary, and RM1,500 a voter in a state, constituency. In the Pendang parliamentary and Anak Bukit state assembly byelection in Kedah in 2001, it spent RM60 million and RM30 million respectively. With an average 40,000 voters in a parliamentary constituency, it needs RM120 million, or a total of RM2.5 billion with another RM1 billion for the state constituencies. The BN allots RM500,000 for a parliamentary, and RM250,000 for a state assembly, candidate. This and other organisational expenses do not fall of the election laws which limit what each candidate may spend since they are absorbed by the political party, not the candidate.

Pak Lah therefore is in a bind. So UMNO leaders meet business men and others in nightclubs, karaoke bars and other such places to get them to donate. With little success. The warlords hedge their bets, and are not as enthusiastic as when Tun Mahathir was in charge to contribute more than a token. The money is there. One cabinet minister gave his daughter a black Mercedes Benz sports car costing a mere RM1.2 million, with a single digit number plate, for her 40th birthday last month. Would he as eagerly help Pak Lah with his election fund? I doubt it. The warlords want to exact their price. They hedge their bets. They see the deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak, as an albatross around Pak Lah's neck. An Opposition Parti Islam Malaysia (PAS) leader, who knows UMNO's funding problems better than many an UMNO leader, says Pak Lah would not have had this problem if the RM4 billion due to Trengganu as royalties from Petronas was kept for its election funds. Instead UMNO frippered it away. The latest issue of the PAS organ, Harakah - which the UMNO Ipoh Barat division leader, Dato' Hamzah Zainuddin, describes in a writ against it as "an influential bi-monthly party newspaper with a strong political favour ... (and) ... widely circulated and read by people throughout the country" - has details of how the UMNO leader in Trengganu, Dato' Idris Jusoh, had an important part in it.

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@streamyx.com