Author: Ali Abd Rahman
The way headlines are being written in the past weeks post-Election
2008 suggests that Malaysia is without a PM. If you have been
keeping track of headlines, there had been hardly a day when the PM
was not in the headline or the front page. Now it is so different.
Not only the PM is not in the headline, you have to dig deep inside a
newspaper to read anything about him.
What happens now is tantamount to a power vacuum. Malaysia – for the
first time since Independence – is without an effective stewardship.
To think of it is very scary. We are into an uncharted territory; we
have never been here before; unexpected things can suddenly happen.
We are so helpless as a nation. However, as a Muslim, we always have
Allah to confide in. Indeed, deep into the nights, pious men and
women kneel before Allah to repent, to express gratefulness, to seek
solace and help so that Allah will save the nation.
The calls are getting louder for the PM to resign. Unless he does
something – and does so quickly - things will get out of control and
before we know it, the nation is on the slippery slope towards the
prophecy being fulfilled – PM will have to resign or be thrown out of
office.
That the man leading the call for PM's resignation is none other than
the former PM himself is so unfortunate. It was Tun Mahathir who,
almost literally, put Abdullah in the PM seat. Abdullah had never
shown any real qualities for leadership. It was the mass media – the
same media which had propped all the PMs before him and probably had
become even more powerful during the tenure of Tun Mahathir – that
had been responsible for Abdullah's stay in power all these years.
Alas, post-Election 2008, the same media has lost much of its clout
and each is fighting for its own survival, let alone to ensure the
survival of the PM which it had failed – or rather had failed it.
As much as I would like to agree with all the fingers pointing at
Abdullah and his son-in-law, Khairy, my contention is that it was Tun
Mahathir who is responsible for all this mess – in UMNO, BN and the
nation. He is the culprit. He is the root cause of all evils. Not
only had he let down the nation, he betrayed it so totally. During
his 28-year reign – which spanned more than a generation - had he
been a responsible leader, he would have groomed future leaders who
could take over from him – and he had plenty of time for that. He
would identify talents and good qualities; he would nurture them,
give them positions and try them. All these he did not do, and
indeed what he did was the opposite - a systematic annihilation of
any potential threat to his leadership. He eliminated his deputies
or potential deputies, one after another; Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah ,
Tun Musa Hitam, and the last was Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim, to name
the most prominent examples. It was also part of his policy to
retain and nurture weak – and corrupt –leaders; you find your own
examples…
Put simply, Tun Mahathir lacks the moral authority to show what is
right for UMNO, BN and the nation, especially at this critical
juncture in the nation's history.
It was also during the time of Tun Mahathir that all the branches of
power – quite apart from the Executive – were brought under his
control, or the control of the Executive. The power of the King had
been diminished to the point of being just ceremonial. (We are lucky
that some power still rests with the Sultans at state level, and as
the Trengganu episode recently unveiled itself, this effectively
checked some potential excesses of the power-that-be.)
It is for the good of the nation if we just ignore Tun Mahathir or
give him a benign gesture 'We hear you, old man!' To be sure, he
belongs to the past, he will never be able to come to terms with the
word 'reform'. He lives in the land of Don Quixote; he should be
set on the trip to the sunset along with his good friends Mugabe,
Castro and Suharto (oops…).
Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely, so the saying
goes. The dependence on all these powers – executive, legislative,
judiciary, enforcement - have been so total and absolute that the
power-that-be – it just happened to be Abdullah at the stewardship –
looked so invincible and felt so confident.
What happened on March 8 had been well depicted in all of the World's
folklore, Malay included; you just need to recall 'The Poor Fate of
Pak Kadok' and 'The Emperor's New Clothes'. In other words, Abdullah
did not see it coming and has been wondering ever since what actually
happened! That he had forgotten that the power given to him was not
absolute – it's Allah's and all of His servants' – made him out of
touch with reality and almost forgot people's power until it was too
late; the media had become his potent enemy – dancing to the tune set
by him and not ready to switch to another tune.
The future looks bleak if not for the silver lining in the dark
clouds. Probably the people had become so sick of BN – for all the
excesses - that they were willing not to vote for it, and to vote for
anything other than BN. The outcome is history for Malaysia. It
rhymes well with the slogan 'Malaysia Boleh'. Now that the three
parties - that have deprived BN of two-thirds majority in Parliament
and rule five states -are willing to consolidate ties in the form of
a coalition 'Pakatan Rakyat', things are looking up for Malaysia.
Let not make any more mistake about it. We are not interested in the
demise of BN (for that will mean that the monopoly on power stays
and it just transfers to another party, and we are back to bad, old
square one). We pity the sorry state which BN now finds itself in.
We sympathise with it, fully aware that it has a long way to go
before it can gain half its previous strength. It better starts with
a reality check; it should abandon the well-trodden path of denial .
Time to heal it really needs. We must be able to say to BN: We are
ready to buy you time; we care for you; we need you; we wish you
well.
What we are longing for is a stable two-party system which has worked
so well in some countries. No matter how much hope we put in Pakatan
Rakyat, we are not ready to throw away the bitter pills that we have
been prescribed with all along. Power corrupts; absolute power
corrupts absolutely. If we fail this time, we have done a great
disgrace to the magic word called 'Reform'.
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