Najib’s good intentions derailed by ultras
The trouble with the PM is that his leadership is precarious and he has to keep looking over his shoulder.
Ishmael Lim, Free Malaysia Today
PM Najib’s programmes for inclusiveness and moderation are being sunk by ultra-right elements. They have negated the Umno President’s attempts at engaging with non-Malay communities. We all know that, but we wonder whether he cares.
Actually, only the non-Malay components of Barisan still cling to the torch of 1Malaysia, desperately wanting to believe that the flame is alive. Others long ago saw through the sham marketing.
The ultra-right sneers at and disrupts anything resembling free speech or democratic practice. They are all for religious and ethnic ascendancy, and they are ultra-royalists and traditionalists, and they refuse to see that feudalism long ago became an anachronism.
They assume the job that Umno is too embarrassed to do for itself, that is to take political expression beyond discourse and onto the streets in mob fashion.
When will the government realise that people now see through the whole charade? Its hard pretending to be a defender of peace when people clearly see whom the promoters of chaos are linked to.
The trouble with Najib is that his leadership is precarious and he has to keep looking over his shoulder. He wasn’t confident ruling with Pak Lah’s abdicated mandate, and he called for elections only when the five-year deadline had almost expired. After obtaining his own mandate from GE13, Najib should have been emboldened, but the weakened majority has made his main concern that of convincing Umno that his every decision is solid. Nothing could be more tiring. There is no point in him attempting the BN strongman act if he is still unsure whether his role as Umno president is secure.
The ultra elements who evicted Pak Lah in 2009, forcing him to take responsibility for the loss of Perak, Kedah, Penang and Selangor, have already started on Najib. There is every reason for him to be nervous since he managed to maintain the status quo only with a reduced majority.
Cosmetic reforms
It was a mistake not to treat with urgency the issues of ethnic polarisation, corruption and cronyism after the 2008 election post-mortem came in. Umno failed to heed the pulse that was thumping for change. It did understand that a radical transformation was vital to quieten that pulse. Unfortunately, the root causes of rot were casually dismissed. Najib went for cosmetic reforms, embarking on expensive re-branding exercises and an image shift, instead of curing the disease that had been ailing the coalition.
It wasn’t at all a problem that could be solved by public relations. Malaysians will remember the silly debates about perceptions of this, and perceptions of that. People just knew that public relations terminology had taken over real action. Discussions on law and order KPIs, for instance, went on and on while robberies and murders continued unabated.
Indeed, systemic problems remain untended.
The ultras of course have their use. They have become the airbags when Umno slams on the brakes. When bright discussions get the better of poor political reasoning, these mobs will be trotted out onto the streets to deflect everything with incendiary demonstrations, usually against some opposition politician or rights activist and, these days, academicians as well. These rabble rousers will see everything as linked to ethnicity. Is it any wonder that they have polarised the communities even more, fuelling equally provocative counter responses and inflaming the onlookers to boot?
The perception that the ultras enjoys immunity from prosecution only cements the public’s belief that the government is being run improperly by prejudiced individuals. This is not a desirable or sustainable state of affairs.
The elected representation of Umno’s BN partners has never been this thin; so minority concerns won’t rank very high on Najib’s list of priorities. At the coming Umno general assembly, he will put aside his BN cap and don his Umno songkok to shore up his flagging support as he plays to the gallery.
The captains of the old propaganda machine are out and about again, reseeding the landscape with freshly manured grains of scorn, turning a minority community into fair game for the shadow-boxing skills of the assembly. These media hands sure know how to provoke a reaction. It is all so old school. They are still repeating the words Mahathir used to chant over and over again. “Be grateful, be grateful.” These toxic seeds are for the debate content of the upcoming assembly.
