MALAYSIAN POLITICIANS SURVIVE on a bountiful diet of "wayang kulit" or shadow play that they cannot often separate fact from fiction. It does not matter if they are from a party in the multi-coalition National Front (BN) of one in the opposition. All believe that what they say in public is the absolute truth, and all else lies. If one dares to point out that the truth is, in reality, a lie, all hell breaks loose. So the Internet newspaper, malaysiakini, is in trouble for writing lies. It does not matter if it is not. Those with the axe over its head has decreed it is, and that is all that matters. Anyone who rises in its defence must be aligned, in the current idiom, not with President Bush but with Osama bin Laden or President George Bush.

There is much of this wayang kulit about these days. As always when a regime change is in the air. The Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed is scheduled to retire by year-end, and only he believes he is not the lame duck he is. Malaysians and diplomats are not prone to accept anything at face value, and I have had both tell me, in utter seriousness, he would not retire, the seeming crises we have seen in the past few months are deliberately connived so he could step back into the limelight. What is real about Dr Mahathir's statement is that he is leaving. Even if he wants to stay. He would have to stand for general elections and the UMNO presidency and in both he could well become a cropper if he did.

There is more. For all the confident predictions BN and UMNO make about the coming general elections, the stark reality is the deep divisions within the Malay electorate. It is this which focusses UMNO leaders' minds. So when the Pahang mentri besar, Dato' Seri Adnan Yaakob, and his state executive committee offered to resign to make way for 'new blood', others took up the refrain. Shortly after, Dr Mahathir reshuffled Kelantan UMNO, discarded its long-time leaders, but kept as its head the one man who could not win an election. But the voluntary promise to relinquish their positions is conditional upon the UMNO president accepting it.

Now other UMNO leaders have offered to do it too. In Perak, five state assemblymen will not contest the general elections. But all this wayang kulit, what one expects in any regime change. The party leaders want to hold on to what they have, and insist on being there when a new UMNO president is in place. If they are serious, why do not they say categorically that they are not candidates in the next general and UMNO general elections? One who believes he is a burden would give way without demur. But all wants to stay on, and hopes this wayang kulit would ensure it. There is a simple reason for this. When the MCA president, Dato' Seri Ling Liong Sik, sent in his resignation in August, Dr Mahathir did nothing about it. Five months later, when it became public knowledge, he was still thinking about it. And they reason, rightly, that if it takes Dr Mahathir five months to be indecisive about a letter of resignation, there is hope yet that theirs would not be either.

When Dr Mahathir then returned from his monthly overseas jaunt -- this time to Lebanon, Egypt and Switzerland -- he made another earth-shattering irrelevant statement. When Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi succeeds him, it would be better for all UMNO leaders to resign. In the UMNO scheme of things, it is the president who decides if and when a leader resigns. But in the Malaysian way, he does not. Now he implies that these leaders have a vested right to stay even after they have outlived their usefulness. UMNO presidents, for all their power and influence, cannot shake off leaders they appoint, in UMNO and elsewhere, without a political earthquake. There exist in an uneasy relationship, in which one needs the other, and a leader is expelled, removed and demonised, only if he does something stupid like waging a war with the UMNO president in which he loses.

Dr Mahathir told reporters that some UMNO leaders have been around a long time. "Some for as long as I have been Prime Minister -- they were appointed by me. I think Pak Lah should have a chance to appoint (people to various posts) himself. It is good if everybody resigns." No one in the press corps present believed him, and laughed. "I am serious ... (it is good) if we all resign and see news appointments." Leaders should not cling to office, he said, and regard their political posts as permanent. But even he, when took over as Prime Minister in July 1981, kept the Hussein Onn holdovers, removing only those who challenged him in the cabinet, not for their incompetence or unrealibility.

He now talks of rejuvenation of leaders. There is precious little of that in UMNO or in BN. Leaders believe that once elected they are immune to political pressure. When democratic methods would not allow peaceful change, then change can only come with violence. The first major forced change in UMNO since its founding in 1946 is the the reformasi aftermath of the dismissal of the then deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim, in 1996. UMNO held on to all who disagreed with Dato' Seri Anwar, and formed a cabal around the president. From then on, it was not the mood and needs of the people that mattered, but the entrenchment of this cabal. But for this cabal to work effectively, it must have support from UMNO. This is when the leaders entrenched themselves so that each needs the other to stay on in office. With a rejuvenating leadership, this is not possible.

In the end it all boils down to Lord Acton's aphorism: power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. The government and BN is utterly corrupt, as it must when both govern and act as if nothing matters but them, and deny Malaysians the right to challenge them, and hold them to account. But it has come to a crunch. The Malay voter still remains on the sidelines, leaning to PAS and Keadilan not because these parties provide an alternative but because there is no one else. PAS and Keadilan, themselves too slow to take advantage of this dissatisfaction, benefit not because of their strength or policies but as inadvertent beneficiaries. The DAP shoots itself in its foot with its irrelevance, and its inevitable conclusion that if PAS leads the opposition coalition, it is more of an evil than BN.

What Dr Mahathir talks of now is not earthshaking. He has made it so. He believes politicians are what matters in a state, the older and more irrelevant nd corrupt they are, the better. he forgets that politicians and babies' diapers must be changed -- and often -- for the same reason. If BN and UMNO rejuvenates under Dato' Seri Abdullah, they can count on being returned to office for a long time to come. But can he affect a change, when the four previous prime ministers could not? Can pigs fly?

[I wrote this for my column in Harakah, the PAS party organ, in its issue of 01-15 February 2003]

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@mgg.pc.my

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Terbitan : 30 Jan 2003

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