The RM 5 billion pledge to destroy Barisan Nasiaonal
The Third Force
For the past eight months or so, I have been talking about reports that pointed towards the nascence of a new political outfit. The new party, said to be the brainchild of Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohammad, is slated for launch before or during the month of September. When I first spoke of this, everyone laughed. They told me that I had a wild imagination and was a conspiracy theorist.
Well, it just so happens that the information was corroborated by one of Mahathir’s many minions, Dato’ Seri Khairuddin Abu Hassan. Last Wednesday, Khairuddin announced that the fractured ex-premier was due for a political comeback on a new platform that he would likely spearhead.
Following the announcement, just yesterday, leaders from PKR, DAP and Parti Amanah Negara (PAN) reached consensus with Mahathir towards the establishment of a new coalition, said to be on a mission to effect a regime change in Malaysia.
“We have agreed to this because we want to cooperate towards a common goal for a change of government for Malaysia,” said Mahathir.
The coalition is set to include the yet-to-be named party which Mahathir is scheduled to announce by or before September. According to sources, Mahathir has in mind to use the new platform to wage an all-out assault against the impregnable Barisan Nasional during the 14th general election and to imprison Dato’ Seri Najib tun Razak thereafter.
In a secret meeting he chaired last December, several of Mahathir’s onetime crony-capitalists pledged a whopping three billion ringgit for the setting up of a new political outfit. Then, when funds towards the Perdana Leadership Foundation by government were discontinued last month, Mahathir negotiated an extra billion from the same source at a roundtable he summoned to discuss his son’s sacking from UMNO.
Interestingly, I have been told that one of his funders just pledged another billion as a ‘reserve’ fund – whatever that means – to bankroll Mahathir’s campaign against Najib in 2017/18. Do the math – you will see that Mahathir is now in possession of a five billion ringgit voucher towards destroying Barisan Nasional come the next general election.
Back in November 1999, Mahathir spent a whopping RM 2.5 billion for the tenth general election, the last in his tenure as Prime Minister. Now, 2.5 billion is an exact half of the five billion he now has credited to his cause against government. Back in 1999, that 2.5 billion earned Barisan Nasional a victory of an unprecedented proportion given that the ruling party was then facing very serious threats to his position as an impenetrable coalition.
Question is, is the five billion going to wipe Barisan Nasional off the map in 2017 or 2018?
One possible way to address that question is to turn back the clock and study issues that pervaded the scene in 1999, and see how that compares to issues that the current administration is faced with.
Now, the tenth general election in 1999 was one of the biggest challenges that Mahathir had ever faced in his political career. Then the Prime Minister, Mahathir was struck with both the edges of the sword when he faced two very distinct and serious threats to his administration.
The first had to do with Islam – Mahathir had come under heavy fire by PAS, a party many were already referring to as the “final Islamic bastion,” for bringing Malaysia under the sway of apostasy. According to PAS, Mahathir was the only hurdle it faced towards realising its Islamic state agenda.
Its president, Dato’ Ustaz Haji Fadzil bin Muhammad Noor, went on to challenge Mahathir to declare Malaysia to be an Islamic country. With the general election looming, Mahathir found himself locked on the horns of a dilemma – he desperately needed the 300,000 odd Chinese voters to remain with Barisan Nasional and couldn’t risk offending them.
His fixation with the Chinese ballot had to do with the sacking of his then deputy, Dato’ Seri Anwar Ibrahim, in the month of September 1998. Mahathir worried that the younger generation of Malays were reform oriented and would swing towards the opposition to teach him a lesson. But that wasn’t the only reason he avoided vexing the Chinese.
Prior to Anwar’s dismissal, the country was caught in the thick of a regional storm that raged with such ferocity, it almost crushed the country’s economy. On the 1st of September in 1998, the KLSE (Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange) composite index plunged to floor a historic 262 points and left even Chinese businesses scrambling for cover. The storm came to be known as the Asian Financial Crisis and triggered an extraordinary out flow of funds – RM11.3 billion in 1997, and RM21.7 billion in 1998.
Now, in case you don’t already know, it was an open secret that the Chinese of the era recognised Anwar’s prowess in economic and financial matters owing to the accolades the former Finance Minister had received from leaders and distinguished organisations abroad. It bothered Mahathir terribly that the Chinese had sympathised with Anwar over his sacking from government and UMNO.
Compounding to these worries was the fact that Anwar had warmed up to Lim Kit Siang right after his (Anwar’s) sacking from government. Coupled with the pressure that PAS had exerted on him over the Islamic state agenda, Mahathir realised that desperate measures were needed to stave off a possible swing of the Chinese pendulum towards the DAP.
So what did Mahathir do?
The first thing he did was to fix the voting day in a manner that disqualified persons who he assumed were reform-oriented from voting. According to election laws, Malaysians must complete their registration six months prior to an election in order to be qualified to vote. By fixing the 29th of November as polling day, Mahathir automatically disqualified 680,000 voters, the majority of which were Malay youths who he believed would have punished him for sacking Anwar.
Having dealt with that, the former premier set his sights on the Chinese.
Mahathir worked out some plans to impress upon the Chinese that the government had them in its best interest. On the top of his agenda was a plan to extend an invitation for the then Chinese premier, Zhu Rongji, to visit Malaysia. And that’s exactly what Mahathir did.
Rest assured, Zhu touched down in Kuala Lumpur on the 22nd of November and stayed on for a full four days. Although his visit clearly coincided with the weeklong electoral campaign that had begun the day before, Zhu flatly denied the correlation. Ironically, the Chinese premier went on record the very same day to encourage the Chinese to vote for the party that “was led by Mahathir.”
The Chinese viewed Zhu’s visit as a commitment by the Sino-government to help Malaysia weather the economic storm. So the deed was done – Mahathir convinced the Chinese that they were not alone in picking up the pieces following the ravages of the economic crisis.
Next, Mahathir began praising the performance of Chinese schools and thanked the Chinese for their contribution to the economy. He even went so far as to support the increase in the number of Chinese primary and secondary schools in Malaysia. To top it all, Mahathir instructed Universiti Tun Abdul Razak to recognize diplomas that were issued by Chinese schools in an eleventh hour bid to allow students from those schools to sit for the University’s entrance exams.
And that is why they call Mahathir a Machiavelli – the former premier had tackled two of the three issues that concerned the Chinese the most – the economy, and education. On the third issue, religion, Mahathir knew then what every politician in Malaysia knows now, that the only other thing that freaks the Chinese more than becoming poor is Islam.
By then, PAS had become a thorn in Mahathir’s neck owing to the anxiety that its president was stirring within the Chinese community. By then also, Kit Siang had long accused the government of infusing Islamic principles into the administration, to a point he implied had jeopardised the secularity of the Federal Constitution.
Now, Mahathir had always subscribed to the principle that the media was an effective mind control tool that he could use to manipulate voters. To strike panic in the hearts of the Chinese, Mahathir instructed local media outfits that were government controlled – virtually all of them – to run editorials that played down the PAS Islamic agenda.
Many editorials were made to look as if they were the opinions of the authors. Mahathir did not want to be seen as personally being against Islam or the PAS Islamic agenda. Even during the rare occasions he came out to whisper a thing or two against PAS, all he would say was that PAS wanted to implement laws that would put the Chinese at a disadvantage.
The results?
Barisan Nasional took a dominating position at the polls and scored a 76.7 percentage point victory, eclipsing even its own performance back during the 1995 general election. The opposition coalition, or Barisan Alternatif, bagged 21.7 percent of the remaining parliamentary seats, while the Chinese ballot was found further tilted towards the MCA and Gerakan.
The poll results proved that the Chinese were willing to support the status quo so long as the government was seen supporting Chinese education and working towards economic reform. But most of all, the election proved that the Chinese would vote into power even a nail on the wall, so long as that nail was not the trigger that would catapult the nation towards becoming an Islamic state.
That was in 1999.
Last month, the ruling coalition clinched an unprecedented victory during the Kuala Kangsar and Sungai Besar twin by-elections, dubbed by the opposition as “a referendum against the leadership of Prime Minister Dato’ Seri Najib Tun Razak.” I say unprecedented, because the ruling Barisan Nasional crushed its competition in a landslide win that more or less shattered the opposition edifice and left both Mahathir and Kit Siang licking their wounds in disgrace.
Amazingly, the twin by-elections bore many parallels with the 1999 general election. For instance, the Najib administration was also caught in the thick of an economic storm that threatened to ruin the economy and the country. Chinese contractors suffered huge losses and were scurrying to strike a deal or two with the government.
And just like in 1997 and 1998, foreign investors were left feeling wrong-footed as the ringgit plunged to never-before heard lows. To make matters worse, Mahathir began accusing Najib of having embezzled funds from 1MDB through foreign media. This triggered panic among foreign investors and cause many of them to pull their funds out from government linked companies.
So what did Najib do?
Some weeks before the twin-polls, on the 25th of May, Najib received a courtesy call from Meng Jianzhu, the Special Envoy to the President of China. Tan Sri Ong Ka Ting, our Prime Minister’s own Special Envoy to China, was present during the meeting and conveyed to reporters an assurance by the Chinese government that the economic ties between both countries would be further boosted through Chinese investments in Malaysia.
“The Chinese government will continue to encourage large-scale investments which will bring a wide range of benefits and job opportunities for the people of Malaysia, and we very much value this,” he said.
A little over two weeks later in Kuala Kangsar, the Prime Minister reminded the Chinese of a recent decision by the Perak Government to allocate more than 1,000 hectares of land to nine Chinese independent high schools in the state.
“This is a meaningful investment for the Tionghua schools,” he told the crowd.
Are you seeing the parallels yet?
Just like Mahathir, Najib tackled two of the three issues that concerned the Chinese the most – the economy, and education. As for the third issue, Islam, Najib did virtually nothing.
To bring you up to speed, PAS president Dato’ Seri Haji Abdul Hadi Awang was clearly seen by the Chinese to be on UMNO’s side of the political aisle. As a matter of fact, it is an open secret now that UMNO had deliberately supported the proposed Bill of amendments that Hadi had tabled for postponement in Parliament last May. Yet, a post mortem by the MCA revealed definite signs that the Chinese pendulum had shifted towards Barisan Nasional.
So it seems that there is something the Chinese fear more than the Islamic state concept. Question is, what is it that could possibly have frightened them more than the idea of Malaysia becoming an Islamic state?
Now, we know that Najib and Mahathir had both worked to eliminate education and economy related concerns from the playing field. So it is perfectly conceivable that the only difference between the 1999 general election and the 2016 twin by-election was the way in which the Islamic state agenda by PAS was tackled.
While Mahathir’s administration did make a conscious attempt to diffuse anxiety among the Chinese over the Islamic state issue, Najib’s administration was seen going the opposite direction by bludgeoning through Parliament with Hadi’s Bill of amendments.
So it seems very likely that the Chinese still remember how Mahathir had made a conscious attempt to ‘Islamize Malaysia’ in his 22 years as Prime Minister (refer http://www.malaysia-today.net/how-kit-siang-and-guan-eng-are-misleading-the-chinese-and-the-christians/). The fact that Kit Siang was seen sharing a stage with Mahathir pissed them off to a point that they refused to vote any candidate seen associated with the DAP.
And what is the lesson we have learnt?
We learnt that between Islam and Mahathir, the Chinese fear the latter more and are even willing to meet the government halfway on the Islamic state agenda, just so long as they never see a return to Mahathirism.
We also learnt that the RM5 billion that has been pledged to Mahathir by some tycoons will do jack shit to subvert the Barisan Nasional government come the 14th general election.
