Is Najib prepared to emulate his father Razak and order Zambry to vacate and stop squatting
Lim Kim Siang
The reasons given by the Prime Minister and Barisan Nasional chairman Datuk Seri Najib Razak why the Barisan Nasional is not contesting the Penanti state assembly by-election in Penang on May 31 does not bear scrutiny.
Najib said the Penanti by-election is not an election provided for by the Constitution but a political game being played by the Opposition and the BN did not want to play to their tune.
He declared: “Barisan’s priority is to serve the people and work to revive the country’s economy.”
What political gobbledegook!
Everybody knows that the real reason the Barisan Nasional is not contesting Penanti is that Najib is frightened of “doing a treble” by-election defeat since becoming Prime Minister on April 3, or a fifth Barisan Nasional setback in 15 months since the March 8 political tsunami in last year’s general elections.
MCA, Gerakan and MIC leaders were also in mortal dread of the Penanti by-election especially after their disastrous outing in the recent Bukit Gantang by-election, which caused the Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department, Datuk Seri Nazri Aziz, to say that Umno must go on its own to regain the support of non-Malay voters and not depend on other Barisan Nasional component parties as BN only secured 11% of the Chinese votes and 9% of Indian votes in the Bukit Gantang by-election.
Where are the MCA, Gerakan and MIC leaders to hide their faces if in the Penanti by-election, they did even worse than in Bukit Gantang by-election securing less than 11% of the Chinese votes and 9% of the Indian votes – although Indians only constitute 2.4% of the 15,384 Penanti electorate?
Najib had defined constitutional requirement for a by-election as death or disqualification of an elected representative whether because bankruptcy or criminal conviction.
But this is not borne out by Barisan Nasional’s own record. Just to give one example. In May 1997, BN created two simultaneous by-elections, one parliamentary and one state assembly in Selangor, so that Datuk Abu Hassan Omar could relinquish his post as Minister for Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs to become Selangor Mentri Besar after Tan Sri Muhamad Muhamad Taib was forced to step down after his RM3 million financial caper in Brisbane, Australia.
Najib is right when he said that there had been one previous instance where BN had not contested in a by-election.
This happened during the time of his father, Malaysia’s second Prime Minister Tun Abdul Razak, in February 1975.
