Humanising the Premiership
It therefore came as no surprise that our present Prime Minister, Dato’ Sri Najib Razak, upon taking the office, would initiate a walkabout around Kuala Lumpur, boarded the LRT and went to Brickfields. After all, Tun Abdullah, before him had almost perfected the art of walkabouts.
Art Harun
At some of time, there is a need to humanise an office, especially when the office houses the seat of power.
Quite often, that office would be a political one. The need to humanise that office arises from the realisation that a political office, and its survival, rest on acceptance by the subjects. And acceptance, to a certain degree, in turn, rests on popularity.
Thus in Malay folklore, we would hear of instances where the Sultan would go “to the ground” disguised as a subject in order to personally find out the feeling on the ground.
Sultan Alauddin Riayat Shah (who replaced Sultan Mansur Shah as Melaka’s 7th Ruler), for example, was well known for going undercover at night when he heard that the Temenggong (old day equivalent of the present day IGP) was not doing a good job. He caught a thief trying to break into a house and promptly cut his hand and hang the hand on the verandah of the house.
Perhaps that account drew its origin from the many legends of great leaders going undercover in order to get a feel of the people whom they ruled.
Caliph Harun al-Rashid has, for example, often been romanticised in Islamic folklore as a charismatic and fair leader who often disguised himself as a “commoner” who walked the streets of Baghdad at night and chatted with traders and peasants.
During such night sojourn, the Caliph would be told of how the high taxes were taking a toll on the traders and his subjects. Of how the judicial officers were taking bribes. Of how the traders had to pay the police. Of how the people felt that the ruler would never ever come to the streets of Baghdad to feel the sufferings of his subject. Of how the people felt about the Ruler’s seeming obsession with nice new palaces, bridges and buildings.
It therefore came as no surprise that our present Prime Minister, Dato’ Sri Najib Razak, upon taking the office, would initiate a walkabout around Kuala Lumpur, boarded the LRT and went to Brickfields. After all, Tun Abdullah, before him had almost perfected the art of walkabouts.
It is a show of a fellow human being walking around fellow human beings who happened to be the former’s subject. Although of course, the presence of two or three batteries of bodyguards, a platoon of camera-clicking microphone and recorder waving journalists and the usual hangers-on almost turned the walkabouts into some sort of a farce.
If there was a small advice which I would be permitted to give in respect of the walkabout, it would be this. I would say that the Prime Minister should not form any conclusion and make public a factual opinion during or after the walkabout. Because it is near impossible for a Prime Minister – or anyone for that matter – to form an opinion on a factual matter, make a factual finding and announce his conclusion just from having a single walkabout.
There lies the problem with the Prime Minister’s conclusion that the people of SS2, Petaling Jaya, were nowadays feeling “safer” after his walkabout in SS2 recently.
