A bogus constitutional crisis

AS soon as Selangor religious chief Datuk Mohd Khusrin Munawi’s appointment as the new state secretary of Selangor was announced, a vilification of Khusrin’s service pedigree was duly orchestrated.

Similarly, the sacrosanct Public Services Commission that endorsed his promotion and the ruling Barisan Nasional were accused of manipulating his ascent.

Despite his apolitical stance, being a career senior civil servant, Khusrin now faces, at the core, a coordinated albeit clumsy smear campaign that tags him as “Umno’s inside man”, unfit for the job.

What makes this appear to be multi-pronged sorties against Khusrin and Chief Secretary to the Government Tan Sri Mohd Sidek Hassan were those swipes from the DAP and Pas, hurling words like “shake and sabotage” the Selangor administration while dragooning Khusrin as a “pro-Umno appointment” that undermines federalism.

A flippant claim was also lobbed that the appointment was “unconstitutional”, even as Selangor Menteri Besar Tan Sri Abdul Khalid Ibrahim conceded the appointment was legal.

Having been out-manoeuvred, a fresh recourse has cropped up. That is the attempt to convene an emergency Selangor assembly to amend the state constitution, ostensibly to regain royal powers to appoint a state secretary, legal adviser and financial officer, all purportedly diluted during the 1993 constitutional watershed.

Here’s the rub: it would be an exercise in futility since the Pakatan Rakyat lawmakers do not command the two-thirds majority needed to push through the amendment.

In the meantime, Khalid issued an all-points bulletin to freeze Khusrin cold: he promised not to attend the swearing-in — a task usually graced by the sitting menteri besar — and barred Khusrin from attending to confidential state and economic matters.

Here’s another rub: Khusrin is nothing so special that it needs a bombastic campaign to counterweight him. It could have been any career civil servant from a backwater hamlet and he would still be slapped with this bogus circus that places him in the same breath as the Sultan of Selangor.

Khalid’s first phase plans to neutralise Khusrin have backfired: palace officials were utterly displeased with what they deemed as “inaccurate, misleading and treacherous” statements made by Khalid, Sri Muda assemblyman Shuhaimi Shafiei, Speaker Datuk Teng Chang Khim and Kampung Tunku assemblyman Lau Weng San.

The allusion to treachery is extremely serious and here’s the reason: The sultan consented to Khusrin’s appointment and made this crystal clear to Khalid during an audience the menteri besar sought.

Khalid then strenuously embarrassed the monarch with unbelievable pronouncements to amend the state constitution.

Why the fussy pronouncements? The rationale is simple. At the nub of the flap, the arguments over jurisdiction to appoint is an irrelevant spectacle: the real and juicy issue here are three machinations underpinning the PR’s overdone protestations:

– A classic “wag the dog” plotting: the innocuous appointment gets the hysterical “mountain-out-of-a-molehill” treatment in the hope that attention will be shoved from the troublesome bloodletting afflicting PR. In a nutshell, a long-held procedure of state secretary appointments is now the supercilious flavour-of-the-moment;

– Details on why Khalid finds Khusrin’s appointment distasteful are fuzzy but the menteri besar probably can’t stand the idea of a straight-laced career government official who plays by the book, an official who can’t fit into a cozy “yes man” role and won’t be put off by the egotistical size of the Selangor PR’s domineeringness; and,

– Being tasked with a high degree of fiduciary responsibility, Khusrin can review questionable books, documents, procedures and, more crucially, be able to do something righteous about it, a fact that seemed to scare the daylights of the Selangor PR executive council.

Khalid may be tied up in legalistic knots if he proceeds with “freezing” Khusrin. Former Court of Appeals judge Datuk N.H. Chan cautioned that if the Selangor government prevents Khusrin from taking his oath of office, it would give Khusrin the “excuse not to maintain confidentiality of state matters”.

“It can be argued that he (Khusrin) is not bound by any impediment or stricture not to reveal anything that happened at the state executive council,” Chan posited in a statement, pointing to Section 52 of the Selangor constitution that states that the state secretary is appointed by a civil service commission, and not the menteri besar or even the sultan.

At best, the PR ploy to run down Khusrin is a frantically reckless political strategy, deployed when calamities of their own undoing explode in their faces.

At worse, they are the reflexes of a political entity unable to fulfil obligations and promises to its electorate, that digs into obfuscation and other grubby gambits to shroud this realisation — the Selangor PR government is a dysfunctional outfit that came to power on the exploitation of the previous administration’s ineffectuality.