Bagan Pinang. Let us decide the UMNO candidate
The joke going around nowadays is how many letters of the alphabet do the people of Bagan Pinang know? The answer 6! What are they?
They are I, S, A, N, J, B. combine any of those letters, you will get, the two recognizable names of ISA or Najib. Isa being the father and Najib being the son.
If the people in Bagan Pinang and especially the UMNO people know only these 6 letters, UMNO is imperiled. It will indeed show the world UMNO hasn't got a talent pool. Its poverty here is caused by mass desertion of talented people disillusioned by UMNO style politics. Your advance in this career is dependent on your status by being who you are. Progress isn't made to depend on what you are capable of doing. Hence the qualifications that matter in UMNO nowadays are who your father or grandfather is. Once those credentials are established, you are assumed to be a chip of the old block. In what turns out to be contumelious logic, you are assumed to inherit only the good genes minus the tainted ones. That's the kind of arrogance and insolence people come to view as the UMNO type.
If Isa Samad wants UMNO to win, he must come out with a declaration that he will support any candidate chosen by the party excluding himself. Yes! he must declare he doesn't want to be considered as candidate so that UMNO is spared from agony. Next he has to say let's give other UMNO division committee members a chance other than his son. For god's sake, Isa has been the MB for 22 years. Isn't that enough already? If you haven't accomplished most of the things you set out to do as MB in those 22 years, what kind of leader are you? Next spare UMNO the agony of treating BP as a personal company by having your son to contest. UMNO people will abandon you if UMNO does this.
UMNO must get out of this mental rut of believing leadership talent is hereditary. Yes I have said that in the worst case scenario, if UMNO rejects Isa, they could choose his son. But only if the son passes a more stringent set of tests. I am entitled to change my mind as I give more serious thoughts about this. I go back to my previous thinking on this subject. It's time for UMNO to break beyond choosing its leaders on the basis of who they are. Let's choose our leaders based on capability of doing.
How do you judge that? How are you going to identify some measures of a person's capabilities of doing something? I know that UMNO leadership has never subscribed to any process of talent spotting, but let's start one. You can't go on in life, expecting willy nilly, by some fortuitous event, some blokes will surface to take over the reins. You need to have a process of grooming and cultivating leadership talent. It is said that Lee Kuan Yew was jolted to look into this aspect of leadership after watching the nearly catastrophic incident on Apollo 13. If the astronauts hadn't the collected presence of mind and coolness, the mission would have failed and the astronauts would have perished. It stirred Lee Kuan Yew's interest to discover the principles by which these few men were selected over the millions and millions of people qualified to become astronauts. How did the Americans identify these few people?
You need besides a desire to be one, some other objective qualities. If you ask around, all the UMNO leaders in Bagan Pinang have the DESIRE to be an ADUN. So, how do you go about selecting among all who have the same desire?
