Sarawakians have no faith in the BN’s anti-corruption sandiwara

Apang

It is truly sickening that the PM still has to okay the prosecution of those in high office engaged in corrupt practices. What can Taib offer Najib that will prevent Najib ordering him to be arrested?

It is certainly not thanks to lack of evidence, that Taib is not being charged. After all, there are ongoing exposés from Sarawak Report website and more on Taib’s families in Hornbill Unleashed, and Sarawakians have long known about the Taib family’s accumulated fortune.

Taib makes Khir Toyo look like a Boy Scout, with Taib’s family’s reported land grabs and accumulation of wealth. This is terribly unfair to the Sarawak Chief Minister’s image, outside of Sarawak that is, coming from a fellow BN partner in Selangor!

Sarawakians must be wondering: is Taib sweating now?

Taib, is this latest UMNO gimmick a consolation to you, or is it giving you sleepless nights? You may think that you still have bargaining chips to use with Najib, but Najib may not see those as valuable chips or even as chips.

Let us speculate on whether Taib is still an asset to Najib. Our readers should have plenty to chip in with, during this discussion.

My postulated ‘chips’ that Taib can use to negotiate with Najib are:

You can try to ensure Sarawak is really a ‘fixed deposit’ for Najib to continue as the Prime Minister. But this is extremely doubtful in urban Sarawak, following the Sibu by-election. Najib showed he is certainly edgy, even about rural Sarawak, when he was forced to announce a RM20 million Federal Grant to the Sarawak Government to survey Native Customary Rights (NCR) Lands in an attempt to please the NCR landowners. Najib’s weakness is that he is being wrongly advised by the likes of Sarawakian Idris Jala. Idris Jala thinks that NCR lands owned by the rural villagers can be restricted by the Sarawak Government’s definitions, and need not be determined by what are rightly the people’s ancestral lands. This has resulted in the Sarawak Government’s Land and Survey Department targets, to survey either a pitifully tiny area of land used as paddy fields and/or individual housing plots, while leaving out the communal lands, despite the clear precedents set by the Federal Court, the highest court in the nation. But then certainly Sarawak Native Customary Rights landowners specifically can never expect any BN government to respect the people’s rights, not even after the judiciary’s final decision.

You can work in close collaboration with Mahathir to ensure that Najib can somehow be brought down. You can try to threaten Najib by agitating Muhyiddin to challenge Najib. But you cannot pursue this tactic at present, when the UMNO general assembly has been postponed for 18 months, and even Muhyiddin’s position is rocky.

You can offer to change the party you lead, PBB, into the de facto UMNO in Sarawak. You can perhaps try to prevent it being called UMNO per se, in order to pacify Sarawakians who may or may not be holding supposed ‘anti-Semenanjung’ feelings. But this can be done by anyone, by someone more trustworthy and more UMNO-centric, certainly not only you.

You can try to force upon Najib the idea that there is no-one besides you who can “unite” – bring together the factions among the Dayaks, Chinese and Malays to be blind followers – the fragmenting Sarawak BN. But Najib knows only too well that unity in the BN family is obtained through money, position and access to UMNO’s inner circle – to abuse power and enrich oneself and cronies. You, Taib, have been using all these, and the tactics of divide-and-rule, so you have crippled BN “unity” in Sarawak. In fact, Najib is slowly but surely waking up to the fact that you are actually the ‘disunity’ factor within the Sarawak BN, and there is no shortage of examples to be used against you.

You can offer projects to Najib’s proxies and cronies. This, too, is doubtful, when your family is known to be currently on a desperate sweep of Sarawak, almost as if they are preparing to be on the run. Even well-established cronies’ business turf is being targeted by the family members for ‘get-rich schemes’ as we speak. For example, your brother, Tufail Mahmud’s grab of Ting Check Sii’s shares in Sanyan. Soon, it will be further revealed how your family also tries to grab the wealth of one of your long-time ally and crony. Furthermore, Najib knows only too well that anyone he puts in to replace you can and will do that anyway.

The end is near

In the end, the inconsistency of the top BN man, the PM himself, and the manipulation of the publicly disgraced institutions like the Attorney-General’s Department, the Police, and the Anti-Corruption Commission combine to dilute whatever sandiwarashow that the PM is doing. The sandiwara of the arrest of Khir Toyo, the ex-Selangor MB whose corrupt practices have long been public knowledge, especially among Selangor voters, has convinced very few Malaysians.

We should note that when the AG himself faced serious allegation of being a crook, he tried to drag his whole department into the mud. This mudslinging continues, although, as in the police, there are those in the AG’s department who are professionals and want to pursue their officially designated task of prosecuting without fear or favour.

We look forward to Sarawakians making the decision for Najib, by making Taib Mahmud the ex-Chief Minister after the next Sarawak State Election. And if prediction is correct that the General Election will be held at the same time as the Sarawak State Election, then there will be no need for Najib to agonize over having to charge Taib for massive corrupt practice because a new PR federal government will ensure all those involved in corrupt practices will be arrested and prosecuted!

courtesy of Hornbill Unleashed