UMNO succeeded brilliantly in putting on a well-orchestrated monologue carnival on the universally fashionable twin-theme of change and reform at their just concluded annual political jamboree. They succeeded in the event of mesmerising themselves into a frenzy. Talking change is easy, but “walking the change” is when the uncommitted falls by the wayside.
By all accounts, UMNO, of all political parties in Malaysia, is a most unlikely candidate for change. It is stuck in a time warp. Its leadership, never known for its ability to focus on critical national issues and respond quickly to the needs of the moment, more often than not, has absolutely no clue where to begin the process.
Blaming the opposition for things that do not go according to plan is well and good, but it would be more helpful and constructive for UMNO to accept and digest a simple fact of life which stipulates that the external pressures acting on you are only as influential as your internal weaknesses. UMNO’s internal weaknesses are there for all to see, but it says a great deal about its organisational culture that the leaders remain both deaf and blind to the rot that stares them in the face. This being the case, UMNO continues to stumble from crisis to crisis, quite unaware why even the Malays who should be rallying round to support it are instead turning their backs on it.
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It is not for want of trying but, for the life of me, I find it difficult to take the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission’s self-trumpeted independence seriously. Since its much hyped up launch just weeks ago, its chief commissioner, Datuk Seri Ahmad Said Hamdan, has managed to put his mouth into overdrive while shifting his brains into reverse on at least two occasions. The F1 television advertisement has obviously got through to me at last.
The first was when he claimed that there was “good and strong evidence” against the Pakatan Rakyat menteri besar of Selangor, Tan Sri Khalid Ibrahim even before the MACC investigation into the “car and cows” saga had got into first gear.
More recently, he was again at his favourite game of shooting his mouth and, not content with that, he succeeded in shooting himself in the foot as well when he declared, to the chagrin and utter disbelief of us all, that there were “elements of misuse of power” in the case involving the Perak assembly speaker, V.Sivakumar. This was over the suspension of the “other” menteri besar Datuk Dr. Zambry Abdul Kadir and his six assembly men.
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Najib Abdul Razak will be remembered as the most controversial prime ministerial aspirant this nation has ever known. The deadweight political baggage he is lugging around, as he sets his course on what he fervently hopes will be the last lap to the best address in the country, is enough to make a grown man cry, but not Najib, the single minded man of destiny according to his wife, Rosmah.
He seems to take his travails in his stride. Is he not, again, according to Rosmah, predestined to occupy the highest political office in the land? I am inclined to think that there may be some truth in what Rosmah has been saying about his destiny because she has already begun, to preen herself, so the gossip goes, to play the part of Malaysia’s First Lady.
Unfortunately for her, and others who might harbour a similar ambition in the deep recesses of their fantasy, our country is a monarchy, albeit a constitutional one (may it always remain that way) and as such, the First Lady is our queen, not the wife of the prime minister. Her confident prediction of Najib’s political ascendancy and immortality could, in the event, prove to be just a little premature given the murky political waters he is wading through.
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As the prime minister begins the process of winding down his stewardship of this country that he inherited from his now much despised predecessor, he would have been less than human if he did not reflect upon the highlights and the low points of his stewardship that in turn cheered and depressed him. He must wonder why, after such a promising start, fate should have intervened to deal him such a cruel hand. The humiliation of being forced to get on the bicycle and ride off alone into the political sunset prematurely has been, he must admit, largely self-inflicted. He must sometimes wonder why he was so incredibly naïve as to swallow the proverbial hook, line and sinker, the assurances and protestations of complete and undying loyalty so glibly and convincingly uttered by his closest associates. I personally would not myself touch them with a long barge pole, but then I suppose I am of a suspicious nature.
When Abdullah Badawi took over the reigns of government, I was among those invited by the media to comment on what his legacy might be. We were swept and overwhelmed by the euphoria of the moment, the dawn of a blessed new era and the end of a morally degrading and debilitating regime. Anyone after Mahathir Mohamad was a welcome change, and the country was happy to give him and the party he led the biggest ever electoral victory in the history of our country. Badawi responded by urging us, his countrymen and women to “work with me and not for me.” This catchphrase symbolising inclusiveness went down well in the beginning, but when people began to see through this as another clever spin-doctoring exercise, it went down like a ton of bricks. Badawi was suave. He could at times be glibly persuasive especially when outlining his agenda against corruption.
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What a waste of public funds! The creation of the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission will go down in history as a feeble and pathetic final clutch at the straws by a sitting duck prime minister best remembered for his inexhaustible supply of good intentions but with nothing to show for them. The MACC was hastily conceived against a murky background of a web of duplicity and deceit. It was a desperate attempt at deluding the people of this country and the world anti-corruption community at large that the Abdullah Badawi administration still had a lot of fire in its belly to make corruption a high risk and low return business. The whole process was nothing more that a charade, a sleight of hand that we had come to expect of this government. In the meantime, corruption continues to be in robust good health.
In 1995 my friends and I started to look at corruption in our country seriously and to view with growing unease its debilitating effects on our society. This led incidentally to the formation of Transparency International Malaysia as it has come to be known. We saw the Anti-Corruption Agency for what it really was in operational terms. It was the weakest link in both the “supply and demand sides” of the corruption equation. We saw the ACA as part of the problem of corruption and not, as it should rightly have been, part of the solution. We thought its claim to “independence” was a joke in poor taste. It was as independent as a beached whale.
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Today, I begin a new life as a columnist for Sin Chew, an experience that I know I will enjoy enormously.
Two days ago, I had lunch with a parliamentarian and two senior bureaucrats from Germany on their first official visit to Kuala Lumpur. They came, they saw and were impressed with our capital city and the development they had seen so far as they travelled around KL and its environs. They had obviously been well-briefed by their own government agencies about the social and political climate in our country and apparently were extremely well informed on Malaysian affairs. The Germans, as we all know, are meticulous in everything they do, and so I was not at all surprised when one of them who headed his organization’s foreign department asked this penetrating question.
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