Of frogs and princes

Now young Malays, both rural and urban, are abandoning Umno. They don't buy its race-based, patronage politics any more. Thanks to 30 years of affirmative action, many Malays have joined the middle class and they are finding that their “Malay interests” are not so different from that of others in the same class.

By Cheong Suk-Wai, The Straits Times

Four “frogs” and a prince have taken the already-beleaguered Umno further into the pit of public opprobrium in recent weeks. The heated coffee shop talk these days is about how clean the ruling party must be before it wins the trust of the average Malaysian, who feels it can do no right in its present form.

If Umno's politicking continues to occupy the spotlight even as Malaysia's economic promise continues to wane, no amount of affirmative action will safeguard anyone's future. The average Malaysian cannot wait for frogs to turn into princes.

The “frogs” who have red-flagged this issue are two former state executive councillors, a former deputy speaker and a defecting assemblyman in once opposition-held Perak. They abandoned the Pakatan Rakyat coalition last week and tipped the balance of power to the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition.

Three declared themselves independents, but all somehow also saw fit to meet Umno deputy president and prime minister-in-waiting Datuk Seri Najib Razak behind closed doors. The trio include assemblymen Jamaluddin Radzi and Mohd Osman Mohd Jailu, who are due to be tried for corruption.

Najib's leading of the charge in Umno's takeover of Perak prompted former Finance Minister Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, a prince, to lash out at BN on his blog. The takeover of Perak was “on the basis of dubious defections”, he charged. Worse, Umno was embracing those accused of corruption even after its image has been savaged in recent months for being corruption- ridden. That, Tengku Razaleigh warned, “would cement the enmity of the very people we should be trying to win back”. This will finish off BN in the next general election.

BN has evolved in such a way that Umno is the government and the government is Umno. No other BN component party will do so much as jump unless Umno says so. It was the guarantor of Ketuanan Melayu, or Malay Supremacy.

But now young Malays, both rural and urban, are abandoning Umno. They don't buy its race-based, patronage politics any more. Thanks to 30 years of affirmative action, many Malays have joined the middle class and they are finding that their “Malay interests” are not so different from that of others in the same class.

Everyone wants to be employed, live better and have smarter children than his or her parents did.

Their rejection of Umno isn't solely due to its practice of money politics. Most understand that lucre is often needed to lubricate the wheels of politics, especially in developing countries.

Rather, their unhappiness is due mostly to Umno's failure to help truly destitute Malays improve their lot. Cream in Malaysia seems to end up fattening already amply fed Umno cats.

Instead of campaigning rhetorically for a clean Umno, as party elders are doing now, Umno might make a clean break with its recent past by listening to and working closely with the Malay ground, its base. The new Perak Menteri Besar, Datuk Zambry Abdul Kadir, seemed to understand this when he stressed how focused he intended to be on the poor in Perak in an interview with a state television channel. In Malaysia as elsewhere, it is always “the economy, stupid” — especially now, with the global economy facing its worst crisis in 70 years.

Najib's own brother, Datuk Seri Nazir Razak, made this point recently. The group CEO of CIMB, Malaysia's second biggest bank, he warned that the government did not have a strategy to lead it out of the current economic crisis.

Think strategically instead of just going great guns on pump-priming, he urged. “We are spending too much time talking about the size of the second stimulus cheque,” he said. “I think we are missing the point if we are just concentrating on writing bigger cheques.”

Indeed, critics of Najib's RM7 billion stimulus package — he serves concurrently as Finance Minister — say it is too heavy on infrastructural projects. The appropriated money will be hard to unbundled fast enough to arrest the country's slide into a slump this year.

More tellingly, Nazir also called for a review of the preferential New Economic Policy, a policy that his own father, Tun Abdul Razak, the country's second prime minister, first introduced in 1970. The NEP, the son said, “retards” national unity, investments and economic efficiency.

His is only the latest voice in a long chorus of business leaders urging a reconsideration of the wisdom of forcing investors to hire Malays first and give up equity to them. One way the NEP might be changed, they suggest, is to shift the focus from giving only Malays an economic leg-up to teaching every poor Malaysian how to fish.

Ironically, the man who may be in the best position to set this change to the NEP in motion is outgoing Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, who is due to step down at the end of next month. There is no better time than now for him to crank the wheels of change into motion. He no longer has anything to lose, yet much to gain, if he pulls the reform off.

If he succeeds, he will be remembered like Najib's uncle, Malaysia's third prime minister Tun Hussein Onn, is. Hussein is remembered for having acted courageously against the then popular but corrupt Selangor Menteri Besar Datuk Harun Idris before leaving office.

If Umno's politicking continues to occupy the spotlight even as Malaysia's economic promise continues to wane, no amount of affirmative action will safeguard anyone's future.

The average Malaysian cannot wait for frogs to turn into princes. — MI