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A Crowd Is Ordered To Make The Prime Minister Loved

The Prime Minister finds public appearances at home and abroad too stressed for his own good. His senior civil servants think it time he went. He skipped a dinner in his honour by retired senior civil servants for fear of empty seats. Malaysian students in the United Kingdom and the United States question him in a manner he would not tolerate on home ground. But he cannt set foot in Malaysian universities and many Malaysian institutions without an army guarding him for fear of an even more virulent response. Even UMNO members look upon him these days as a Greek bearing gifts. He cannot expect a full hall nowadays for his speeches, unless his officers order it filled by hook or crook. It is not unusual for the hall to be empty 30 minutes before his intended appearance. In his Persiopolis of Putra Jaya, civil servants must, with no exception, fill the hall. The Emperor should not know he is naked.

What happened at Sungei Way, on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, where he opened the UMNO civil action bureau service centre on Wednesday, 18 October 00, is typical. This centre is UMNO's special plan, as the Prime Minister emphasised, "to bring itself closer to the people". Somehow, he could not relay that message to those who were there to welcome him. Half an hour before the Prime Minister's arrival, not even a parliamentary quorum was present. The factories in the vicinity were ordered to send their workers to the function to learn from the Prime Minister how UMNO would care for them. If Mohamed refuses to go to the mountain, the mountain must come to Mohamed. You would not read of this drama in the mainstream newspapers; but the workers resented being ordered to attend the function or face the wrath of the management. Why were not government officers in the vicinity asked to attend instead? A highly placed source tells me that is wasted effort: These rascals refuse to.

That is not all. He visited a college in Malacca recently. Few students turned up. The hall had to be filled by similar strong arm methods. No doubt one of the benefits of industrialisation in places like these is the numbers to make the Prime Minister look good and self important is there at the doorstep. He cannot attend a university campus without untoward incidents. He cannot attend UMNO meetings knowing it could not be filled. He is more comfortable addressing Malaysia's future to foreign groups overseas, with the only Malaysian audience his staff and the rent-a-crony crowd that accompany him the world over.

He wants to spend more time, so he says, on UMNO matters. But UMNO would rather he disappear into the woodwork. The more he appears in public, or his pronouncements made from well-guarded, often hidden, bunkers, the more the questioning abut his competence and relevance. He has not dared, since the Anwar affair in September 1998, to visit the UMNO bondooks to explain himself. Criticism of him from the UMNO bondooks is more severe than from his urbanised cousins. The more he and his handlers ignore this gross disenchantment, the more probable of an UMNO Hesseltine to public call for his resignation. Mr Michael Hesseltine, you may recall, is the British cabinet minister who called for Mrs Thatcher's resignation and brought Mr John Major to No. 10 Downing Street.

I am told by more experienced and shrewder political minds that none in the Malaysian cabinet could be a Hesseltine. Not so. They bide their time. Challenging the leader is "derhaka" (treachery), but the tendency to revolt is more probably now than in the past 20 years. Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah disappeared into the political loop when he could not unseat the Prime Minister in 1987. He remains in the running but would not openly challenge now, though his forces prepare for it. New permutations turn up by the day. The government is frozen into rigor mortis at this possible act of treachery or bravery, depending on how you view it. UMNO anticipates a new leader before long. This suggests a clean break. The UMNO constitutional changes next month would not work unless it is implemented immediately. That requires fresh UMNO elections after the amendments are accepted, after the immediate retirement of the older leaders responsible for this mess. That is unlikely, in the view of the leaders, who would not agree to be sidelined because of it. Reformasi is painful, but is there any other way? So, the charade goes on. The Malaysian mainstream media crowing to the world there is no prime minister but the Prime Minister, when the rest of Malaysia looks at a tired old man, having lost his way, tilts at windmills.

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