Umno too riddled with old ideas to accept change
Regardless of who was elected, the long-term outlook for Umno would not change. In the long run, Umno is doomed. It needs to change, but it has shackled itself into a corner where it cannot change.
John Lee, The Malaysian Insider
The Umno elections are over; Datuk Seri Najib Razak has assumed his rightful place, politicians have risen and fallen, and Khairy Jamaluddin has made his surprising comeback. But has anything really changed? The point of elections and leadership changes is to make a break with the past. Malaysians rejected Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi because he failed to make this break, and this is something Umno still cannot recognise: it rejected Abdullah because he tried to change too much. And no matter the outcome of the Umno elections, it was and is assured that Umno will refuse to change — and this spells doom for the party and the country.
Among the public, it’s common wisdom that Abdullah’s failure was his refusal to break with the past. He shut down newspapers and locked up journalists. He let money politics run rampant. The civil service remained mired in red tape and graft. He let corrupt cronies reap the gains of economic growth on the backs of hardworking Malaysians. The most racist tendencies of Umno, always chomping at the bit but suppressed beneath the surface previously, came to the fore under Abdullah. Under almost every metric that matters, Abdullah was a failure as Prime Minister.
But in Umno, it’s equally common wisdom that Abdullah’s failure was his willingness to change. Abdullah let the press have at the government like never before. He refused to take tough action against the party’s critics and its opponents. He let opposition leader Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim walk out of jail a free man. He cracked down on previously profitable but corrupt ventures for politicians. He was not at all like his predecessor, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, and this weighed heavily against him in Umno’s book.
Both sides are right. Abdullah was simultaneously too willing to embrace change, and simultaneously to weak to embrace it wholeheartedly. I think those who judge Abdullah harshly as ill-intentioned are too quick to jump to conclusions, while those who judge him as too weak to be another Dr Mahathir are too quick to forget that that is not why he was elected with a hearty mandate in the first place.
I know quite a few people who are counting on the new Umno leadership team to do something new, to shake things up. Some of these people are working from within to effect positive change — to crush corruption and put the kibosh on racism. They believe Umno’s new leadership, especially men from a newer generation like Khairy and Datuk Hishammuddin Hussein, may have what it takes to put into place the stout reforms Malaysians demand.
I wish these reformers well, but I am afraid this is a futile fight. The institutional structure of Umno is too riddled with old ideas about how Malaysian politics should work. When the men and women leading the most powerful party in the country applaud people who get away with blatant bribery and rampant racism, it’s crystal clear that you will almost need a miracle to change this into a party standing for justice and equality.
Regardless of who was elected, the long-term outlook for Umno would not change. In the long run, Umno is doomed. It needs to change, but it has shackled itself into a corner where it cannot change. The deck is completely stacked against change in Umno. Berani berubah? The only thing these people are berani enough to do is berani berasuah — a word that’s been rightly thrown around a lot these last few days at the Umno annual general assembly.
In the short run, the best we can hope for are some cosmetic changes. Maybe Khairy will make the Youth wing loosen up on alternative media, just a smidgen. Maybe Najib will tinker at the edges with the New Economic Policy. But these men have no hope of taking down the whole system, even if they wanted to; they were elected by a party of men and women completely opposed to any such reforms.
And if anything, we may well be in for a rough ride over the next few years, because Najib was elected to fill Dr Mahathir’s shoes. Umno delegates were never looking for a reformist; what they wanted was someone who could be like Dr Mahathir and tell the media to shut up or go to hell, and tell opposition leaders to jump in a lake or go to Kamunting. The short-term outlook for our country is not good.
I hope there are still people in Umno working from within to change it, but I also think it is increasingly clear that what we will need is a whole new government to truly change. We do not have time for Umno to iron out its hang-ups about corruption and racism when we have an alternative coalition ready to do something about these problems from day one. If Umno wants to really reform, it can do that on its own time, while it’s out of power; it doesn’t need to waste the rakyat’s time while we wait and hope that they can sort things out. But I fear Umno wants to stop reform in its tracks — and as long as it hasn’t got the message, I will be looking forward to its impending defeat in every election between now and the time we finally elect a new party into power.
John Lee is a second-year student of economics at Dartmouth College in the United States. He has been thinking aloud since 2005 at infernalramblings.com.
