When it comes to abuse of power by enforcement agencies, says Youth and Sports Minister Khairy Jamaluddin Abu Bakar, what is important is “stern action” and not which agency is taking it.
Umno secretary-general Datuk Seri Tengku Adnan Mansor said on Sunday that the party supreme council had already decided that both the president and deputy president posts would not be contested in the party elections.
The biggest crisis in the UMNO is its leadership where members cannot take a political decision And the signs are already there. A whole bunch of leaders excused themselves out during the party supreme council meeting. was Datuk Seri Tengku Adnan Mansor heckled outside by Muhuyidin supporters (or were there paid for by his PR agency??? Such things are known to be done by PR firms). Mahathir quit from party but the party managed to bring him back. But just see what’s happened in UMNO.
This is mainly because of two reasons. Firstly, the 1987 contest split Umno into two and resulted in Umno getting deregistered (followed by the fall of Kelantan in the 1990 general election). Secondly, the President and Deputy President of Umno will become Malaysia’s Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister respectively. Hence Umno would not just be choosing its top two party leaders but the top two leaders of the country as well.
suarakeadilanmalaysia is wondering if this is what had anticipated when Dr Mahathir went ahead with nominating Najib for the president post No doubt this ‘no contest’ ruling can be considered as technically illegal because all party posts should be open for contest. But then Umno’s ‘system’ allows for the party’s supreme council to make rulings that are final and that cannot be challenged in court or overridden by the Registrar of Societies. Therefore democracy can be suspended for the sake of ‘stability’.
UMNO leadership where members cannot take a political decision appear strange and even undemocratic to the uninitiated. However, Malaysia is full of contradictions and these contradictions have been accepted as necessary for the sake of ‘peace and stability’. I mean, while the Federal Constitution says that there is freedom of assembly, the police can still arrest you for organising and attending an ‘illegal assembly’. And while the Constitution says you cannot be detained without being informed of your crime and that you must be brought before a magistrate or released within 24 hours, you can still be detained without trial and without legal representation for an indefinite period of time.The advantage of having a pre-ordained leader is that there are no internal skirmishes or bickerings related to that. It settles issues of hierarchy within the party – after all, there can be only one top-dog, so many more leaders can be “accommodated”. On the other hand, the leadership issue in UMNO was always known to be a problem; only its play-out has been far worse than anticipated.
Targeting Mahathir and Najib for practising dynastic politics,alleged that Najib running UMNO like a ‘corporate company’ where a board of directors take the decisions and leave it to a CEO to implement the same on the country. He said that the biggest crisis in UMNO is its leadership. When a journalist asked a question on Najib, his relations withUMNO members, the Prime Minister said the decision will be taken by the high-command. The Prime Minister cannot take a political decision. He just implements orders
If the UMNO represents dynastic culture, Mahathiri has started being equaled with a highly personalized, almost cult-like and dictatorial way of functioning. Clearly, there are the chosen favorites ofMahathiri, and his efforts have been to increase the club of such followers. Those who are not overtly supporting Najib, or are expressing a divergent point of view, become part of the “opposite” camp, to be cut to size in due course of time. It’s now emerging that this style of leadership has been around for some time. People are asking who the number 2 in UMNO unit is, and hardly any names come to mind
Giving his word of advice to UMNO workers for the upcoming UMNO elections , that the debate of dynastic democracy” has to be taken to the people. Najib come from a great political family? He worked as a party activist for decades with the people to acquire the status that he has today. Look at our leaders everywhere and ask who amongst them came from a political dynasty? Only those leaders who have proved their mettle will be recognized. Credibility is needed to win elections. And no one can raise a finger at Najib to allege corruption,”We cannot control the evil tongues of others; but a good life enables us to disregard them.
A seniorMalaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) official was recently heard complaining about the defensive mode his superior have got into while dealing with Najib-related cases. The central investigating agency, which has not yet completely recovered , has become over-cautious, thanks to the frightening possibility Najib keeping his prime minister post.
Earlier this month, Najibi’s close aide Rosmah had warned Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) for carrying out political agenda while investigating the Mongolian woman. “Regimes are not immortal. I do hope one day a commission of inquiry will investigate the functioning of the, Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) its politicization and all these above cases,” he had written.
Obviously, theMACC officials, who have a long career in front of them, are scared of becoming pro-active in cases which could implicate Najib. They are well aware of the victimization of MACC officers who withstood government pressureand refused to toe the political line.
home ministry and is said to be the man who is coordinating the legal cases which could land Najib in further trouble. is not able to make much headway because of the reluctance of officials working in investigating agencies.
Sources said the main reason why Mahathir was in such a tearing hurry to be declared Najib candidate was to insulate himself against such attacks. MACC officials are now wary of proceeding ahead with leads in the multiple scandal cases.
The public must by now be feeling so blasé from the endless rounds of the weird masquerading as the normal in the government of Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak that the latest argument that his administration is deeper into weirdo land recalls the humourist who thought he had hit bottom and then heard someone tapping from underneath.
A scandal-sodden public can reasonably be expected to be groggy about the fact that the month and the year when a supposedly transformative PM compounded his cabinet of illicit personnel was exactly 25 years on from the trigger for all subsequent mutilations to what is regarded as the due process of constitutional governance.
This was the impeachment of then-Lord President Salleh Abas, an act of such monstrosity and cascading ill-effects that Abdullah Ahmad Badawi’s attempt, on his prime ministerial watch (2003-09), to mitigate its virulence by offering sops to the wounded and the maimed among the affected justices is rather like Japan’s effort to come to terms with the victims, comfort women and Death Railway inductees, of its imperial past – measly and inadequate.
“Our parents sowed dragon’s teeth, our children know and reap the armed men,” goes a saying of uncertain patrimony but singular pertinence to our current predicament.
A Prime Minister, whom we have good reason to believe is a suspected felon in the cover-up of a murder case no less, is heading a government placed in power on minority say-so, and is now in charge of a cabinet composed of some people who have about as much right to be there as some dubiously obtained MyKad holders had in being on GE13′s electoral register.
The question at this stage is: Can things get any worse and if they do, will we see the removal of the coalition that has been in charge of this country since independence in 1957? Things can and will get worse. This we can predict from what has already happened and will continue to happen.
After years of keeping at the rear of change rather than in advance of it, UMNO and parts of BN find themselves – a month after a general election that has confirmed that the political dogmas of the past are inadequate to a transitional present – running on the spot.
Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak and Deputy Muhyiddin Yassin, in remarks made after their initially tentative conclusions about the import of the results of GE13 had mutated to firmer findings, intimated that BN and UMNO must change to stay relevant.
Muhyiddin, in particular, went a little further by suggesting a study of the possibility that a single party BN would be the way to proceed in contrast to persisting with the presently multi-component structure that has been in power since 1974 and, before that, holding the reins of government since independence through its precursor, Alliance.
Presumably, Muhyiddin was reacting to the phenomena of Malay voters in urban and semi-rural seats marking the ballot for DAP and Chinese all over the country ticking the box for PAS.
This factor was behind the Opposition Pakatan Rakyat’s gains in Selangor where BN had mounted an intense but ultimately fruitless campaign to recover the richest state in the country.
Possibly chastened by this phenomenon, Muhyiddin, hitherto assertive about the immutability of his Malay-ness and its lofty position in the UMNO-nurtured racial pecking order of the country, gave vent to an idea that many in UMNO would like to be amnesic about: his suggestion that BN could become a single party conglomerate was essentially a variation on a theme aired as early as 1951 by UMNO’s founder, Onn Jaafar.
Onn had to leave UMNO, chagrined by its resistance to an idea whose time had not then come but whose point could only be deferred, not interred. Six decades later, Muhyiddin, a scion of Johor UMNO where the party was birthed, has re-floated what a seer-like Onn had first proposed.
A stillborn idea
However, the reactions from within UMNO or from within its extra-territorial fold, PERKASA, to Muhyiddin’s idea confirmed what the British historian John Macauley, master of many intricate partisan maneuvers in his historical research, observed to be true about political parties.
Macauley said that it is in the nature of political parties to retain their original enmities far more firmly than their original principles. Talk of retention of original enmities, shortly after Muhyiddin spoke about a single BN party, PERKASA was on record as warning of grave consequences to those who “erase” UMNO.
The responses of other elements in the UMNO quarter were less dire though no less inhospitable.
UMNO Information Chief Ahmad Maslan said that conservative UMNO Malays would not countenance the idea of a unified BN party; Vice-President Ahmad Zahid Hamidi speculated that the idea arose from the desperation felt by BN component parties which had been annihilated at the recent polls; and UMNO eminence grise Dr Mahathir Mohamad observed that the idea’s time had not yet arrived.
In effect, the reactionaries were saying that what the average voter in the economically leading state of the country was signaling about his political preferences was not what the common UMNO member was inclined to go with.
Sure, less economically endowed Malays in the rural parts of the country had voted for UMNO, a decision prompted in part, in states like Kedah, by the incompetence of the former Menteri Besar from PAS, Azizan Abdul Razak, and abetted by the BRIM (1Malaysia cash handouts) payments they received that required of them a reciprocal obligation to vote the hand that fed them.
But this category of voter is not a demographic that is set to stay for long. If anything, it will recede as rural-to-urban migration accelerates, as people age, and as the threat of mounting insolvency incurred by profligate BN governance becomes palpable.
In short, UMNO and BN are riding a waning wave of voter preference but its leadership ranks are infested with people who cannot distinguish between their specific career interests and the long-term interests of the coalition of which their party is a dominant part.
Mired in fevered swamps
Too long in thrall to the dogmas of a race-centred worldview, large swatches of Umno and several components of the BN are mired in its fevered swamps, unable to disenthrall and thus renew their party.
Even the defeat at the polls to politicians like PERKASA firebrand Ibrahim
Ali, who lost his Pasir Mas parliamentary seat in Kelantan, and to Zulkifli Noordin (right), the religious bigot and agitator, who was dumped with ease in the Shah Alam federal seat, is apparently not sufficient to convince Umno that the party, as presently constituted and led, is on sliding scale on the voter-preference graph.
Too long a stay in power – this more than a half-century UMNO-BN one aided by a rural voter-weightage that’s gone off the rails, and abetted by the machinations of an Election Commission that’s an adjunct of the government – leaves the anointed with the feeling that come what may, they are ordained to stay.
If it’s true that without vision, people perish, as the French philosopher Blaise Pascal held, then it must also be true that without reform and renewal, sclerotic political parties diminish and die. It’s just that some may mistake merely running on the spot as an adequate substitute for R & R.
