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No love lost between Pak Lah and Dato' Seri Najib

IT IS THE WORST-KEPT secret: the ill-disguised contempt and hostility between the prime minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, and the deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak; complicating it is the like "love and affection" their wives have each other. Pak Lah pulls rank, and Dato' Seri Najib cannot but rise to each snap of the older man's fingers. As one who knows both said: "If looks could kill, all four would have been dead months ago." Before the Hermit of Langgak Golf turned up to skewer the political pitch, leader and deputy and their supporters focussed their attention of bringing the other down.

No one wants a deputy who would, and could, in a trice sideline his leader. Malaysia's founding prime minister, Tengku Abdul Rahman, an amiable yesterday's man catapaulted to be prime minister, had the efficient and administratively capable Tun Abdul Razak as deputy. They worked well after a fashion, the older man looking after political issues and the younger minding the store. Years later, when the Tengku returned to centre stage after being driven into the wilderness in the wake of the 1969 racial riots, he would say that Tun Razak's problem was that he did not have a "Tun Razak" to help him.

But other leaders did not have this luck with their deputies. Tun Razak died too early in office to have a problem, although he could have if the forceful and temperamental deputy, Tun Ismail Abdul Rahman, had out-lived him. Tun Hussein who succeeded him chose the man now known as Tun Mahathir Mohamed, who in time manipulated behind the scenes to force him to retire.

When Dr Mahathir took office, he chose as his first deputy, Dato' (now Tan Sri) Musa Hitam, a close political ally exiled with him from UMNO after the 1969 racial riots. They parted ways when each spent more time to outrank the other that a clash was inevitable. This led in 1987 to Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah challenging him with Tan Sri Musa as his running mate. By all accounts both defeated the official candidates, but in a neat example of political chicanery and cheating, the result was reversed. This led to UMNO's dissolution by the courts, and from its ashes a new UMNO rose.

Even that was not without its drama. In 1988, after UMNO's dissolution, Tengku Razaleigh submitted an application for a new UMNO to be formed. The registrar of societies promptly informed Dr Mahathir, who was still prime minister, of it, she would have to allow it if he did not file an application to pre-empt the Tengku's. Dr Mahathir made sure that Tengku Razaleigh was not in the new UMNO for if he was, the good doctor would have been defeated in its first election.

So, the new UMNO was predicated for Dr Mahathir to remain in power and keep Tengku Razaleigh out. The onerous rules that UMNO has to prevent challenge is so the prince could not ever attain office. That he is within striking distance now, and certain of it, is still conditional on him getting the minimum 58 nominations. Even the Pak Lah camp accept that if he does, he would be swiftly returned.

To return to the narrative. Dr Mahathir then chose Mr (now Tun) Ghafar Baba to replace Tan Sri Musa, but had to drop him in 1993 when his protege and now nemesis, Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim, collected enough nominations to defeat Tun Ghafar for the deputy presidency. Rather than face a humiliating defeat, Tun Ghafar withdrew. Dr Mahathir had to eat humble pie. But while he brought in Dato' Seri Anwar, he also planned for his eventual destruction. That was when Pak Lah was brought into the cabinet, after years in the wilderness, dismissed from the cabinet for aligning in the 1987 UMNO elections to the Tengku and Tan Sri Musa. His task was to keep a wary eye on Dato' Seri Anwar.

When Dato' Seri Anwar fell in 1998 because he planned, like Tan Sri Musa, to oust his leader, Dr Mahathir wanted to make an example of him. He had by then been in office for 17 years. He believed he was irreplaceable, and his belief that he is heaven's gift to Malaysia made him act out of Malay character, and put Malaysian politics on the skids. He brought in Pak Lah as Dato' Seri Anwar's successor. But in a destroyed UMNO, bereft of its cultural and traditional strengths.

The animosity between Pak Lah and Dato' Seri Anwar goes back to the latter's student activist days. It has not gone away. Pak Lah has been in the thick of every move to paint Dato' Seri Anwar as an dangerous reprobate and homosexual. He was one of the special team which viewed a manufactured homosexual videotape to damn Dato' Seri Anwar, but which was so badly done that no one in the end believed it.

What unites Pak Lah and his deputy, Dato' Seri Najib is that both were active in destroying Dato' Seri Anwar's political and personal persona. Only that they did it so hamfistedly that few believe the sodomy and corruption charges for which the man is convicted, and remains an enigmatic political conscience much as Mr Nelson Mandela in prison was to South Africa's blacks, hovering as a ghost in the background and in UMNO's conscience.

But Pak Lah and Dato' Seri Najib was like the Tengku and the latter's father, only that the son has no plans to be a loyal deputy and the leader is distrustful of him. If as Pak Lah had hoped, he had an easy ride to be president of UMNO in his own right, his first order of business was to sideline his deputy and replace him with an unelectable apparatchik, Dato' Mustapa Mohamed.

But Pak Lah is challenged, and he had to call off the destruction of his deputy. Dato' Seri Najib, on the other hand, realised the danger he is in, and distance himself from Pak Lah. When Pak Lah needs him now, he is not keen on it. For he knows once they are home scot free, his political problems would start afresh. So he stays in the middle, between the contending forces of Pak Lah and Tengku Razaleigh and hope - he cannot expect more than that - that the winner would find it politic to align with him.

It is dangerous, but the only course he could take. He hopes that all's well that ends well, and he is on the winning side no matter what. Pak Lah and his supporters overplayed their hand and now does not have the Najib forces to back them up. Their fear is he would switch to the Tengku. But that presupposes that the Tengku has forgiven Dato' Seri Najib of walking away from him in the late 1980s when at a meeting to welcome him into Semangat '46, the Tengku's party, he decided he would not and went back under Dr Mahathir's umbrella in UMNO. But the uncertainty is enough to drive the Pak Lah camp up the wall.

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