MGG Pillai Commentary View

<< Previous || Next >>

The clash of the UMNO pygmies

THE ONLY POLITICAL UNCERTAINTY these days is if the Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, or the deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak, would win this coming clash of the UMNO pygmies. The clash is not over issues or policy or Malaysia's future direction but of who controls UMNO and the near absolute power it gives him. UMNO's dominance in Malaysian politics has lasted one year short of five decades. This invincible position ignored, in time, the views of others, even critics within, and a worldview that the Opposition could be safely ignored. The 1969 racial riots changed all that. The constitutional and political changes made UMNO invincible in government. But the leaders used it for personal power and control. Dissent is dealt with harshly. When an opposition party shows its teeth and threatens its continued hold, its leaders were carted off to detention without trial.

For this to continue, the UMNO leadership must be united behind its president. He must rule with an iron hand. This autocratic rule characterised the BN government in the centre and the state. Parliament and the state assemblies were ignored, as policies and law were forced down the throats of Malaysians. Public concerns were ignored, and addressed only when and where the Opposition was strong. For such a system to succeed, UMNO needs strong leaders. The success of the constitutional and political changes after the 1969 riots depended on strong UMNO presidents. The dramatic changes in Tun Mahathir Mohamed's 22 years as Prime Minister and UMNO president could not hold if his successor was not as dominant. He is not.

UMNO changes directions not that it needs to, but that its President wants it. But Tun Mahathir overestimated his own hold over UMNO and the government when he sacked, jailed and humiliated his deputy, Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim, who took to the streets. A more powerful UMNO figure, the late Dato' Harun Idris, tried it when he was arrested for corruption and misuse of power when mentri besar of Selangor. He went to jail and disappeared into the wilderness. Even Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah's revolt took him nowhere. Dato' Seri Anwar's did, and he emerged stronger than when he went in. The middle class, fed up with being held to ransom by UMNO and BN, took to the streets. Dato' Seri Anwar unleashed a revolution which frightened UMNO. He judged the ground mood was such that it would question UMNO as never before.

The opposition he unleased within UMNO and amongst the middle class puts Pak Lah in fear of his position. Within UMNO, the winner takes all. If they do not accept it, they are forced out or held to ransom by an mind-boggling array of legal and political actions. But Pak Lah cannot afford to. The ground rules have changed. His opponents are prepared to stand out and be counted. His chief opponent is Dato' Seri Najib, whose legitimacy comes from the middle class force Dato' Seri Anwar unleashed. He and Pak Lah are at daggers drawn. But they are pawns: Pak Lah by his own advisers and family and Dato' Seri Najib by the hidden hand of Tun Mahathir. There is talk, which aides of both deny, of a rapprochement between the Pak Lah forces and Dato' Seri Anwar's. This deep division in UMNO is all but impossible to repair.

That BN and the federal and state governments it controls are deeply divided is therefore not unexpected. Each face a leadership crisis, individually and collectively. The mass media, which one or the other controls, ignore this metastasis within, but in their haste to protect the leaders, reveal more than they would otherwise. Take any party in the BN, or any state it controls. The BN is in crisis. Especially when its leaders insist there is no crisis. But it did not take this crisis within seriously until it hit UMNO and its leaders. In the months since the General Election in March 2004, the crisis within UMNO, after its president, Pak Lah, engineered the BN's largest ever election victory, winning 90 per cent of the seats in Parliament and all but one state assembly.

But his victory was pyrrhic. For two reasons. He was not the architect of that victory. The BN won so handsomely because the Opposition presumed his predecessor, Tun Mahathir Mohamed, would lead it. If he had, the BN could well have lost more ground. So when he resigned, the Opposition was caught flatfooted. The voters gave the untested leader the benefit of doubt. Secondly, Pak Lah, like the Opposition, ignored the Mahathir factor, and manipulated the votes so blatantly that even sections in UMNO cried foul. He was weaker in office after the elections than before. His hope was to be elected unopposed as UMNO president. But he doubted if he could.

So he orchestrated it yet again. Those who would have proposed other than Pak Lah were, amongst others, served with bankruptcy petitions, in one instance the night before the divisional meeting. He did not want a contest under any circumstances. His only challenger, Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, was nominated unopposed in his Gua Musang division. The two men were uncontested in the divisions they stood. The UMNO presidency weakened his hold on the party, and by extension BN. This meant he could not reshuffle his cabinet. He is so unsure of his ground that he feared any dropped could well move in with his deputy. He is wrong to assume this. He is mortally afraid of a palace coup by his deputy, Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak.

He should have acted decisively from the start, reshuffled his cabinet, behave as to the manor born. Instead, he retained the tired Mahathir cabinet, could not make up his mind, cocooned himself with untested advisers and a nepotic cabal. His vision of Islam Hadhari is shot to pieces: several of his key aides have been caught red handed for khalwat, but are kept on, often at more powerful positions. His promises to bring the corrupt to justice is forgotten. He has not moved into his official residence; whatever the reason, it is viewed, and believed, as a deliberate attempt to deny his deputy an official residence. The two wives, besides, do not get along.

But there is fear too if Dato' Seri Najib is the victor. His wife's business proclivities, his questionable handling of national security, the belief that he is a Mahathir proxy, his eager crowd of cronies who stand to benefit if he succeeds work against him. Some prominent UMNO leaders talk of a no-confidence move against Pak Lah at the UMNO general assembly in September. He might not survive it. The Najib faction would see to that. But then nor would Dato' Seri Najib then succeed Pak Lah. The Pak Lah faction would see to that. The UMNO assembly could be forced to elect a new president. Or UMNO goes down the drain after that. How this would affect the BN is of course another matter.

[My column in Harakah, the PAS organ, for its 01-15 May 2005 issue, and published today, 27 April 2005]

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