Zed Eye Launches Parti KITA

The Latest Gyrations of Zed Eye (ZI) at KITA Launch

by Terence Netto@www.malaysiakini.com

Zed Eye launch his Parti KITA (Parti Kesejahteraan Insan Tanah Air)

COMMENT: The Zaid Ibrahim show ran its opening credits yesterday in what appears to have been a show business-style unveiling, with the Rolling Stones’ anthem of 1960s angst, ‘I Can Get No Satisfaction’, rendering an upbeat touch to the proceedings.

You got to hand it to Zaid: he has brought entertainment glitz to the rather staid business of Malaysian politics. The bit from the Stones is nicely calculated to attract the young, urban middle class voter – that is, if he or she is registered – who presumably will not discover Zaid’s spiel to be something that “goes on and on” about “some useless information” to “grab [his or her] imagination” , as the riff from Mick Jagger and Keith Richards goes.

Parti KITA (Parti Kesejahteraan Insan Tanah Air), Zaid’s creation which waslaunched yesterday, may or may not end up in oblivion, like political parties that sprouted in the mid-1980s, led by people like Zainab Yang, the tough lady of the truckers’ association.

Then, there was a full-blown recession coupled with dissonance in UMNO because of Musa Hitam’s resignation and, yet, Zainab’s party Nasma (Parti Nasionalis Malaysia) could not last; it just dribbled out of sight.

Now, we are being pumped primed out of a recession, so Prime Minister Najib Razak claims, and the opposition stands are packed with a coalition of pretenders to the BN mantle, and a slew of other parties loudly demanding bit parts in the anticipated dethronement.

Yet Zaid Ibrahim feels KITA (you got to give it to the man for confidence) has a chance to make a dent for presumably, his party can be counted on to keep the flame of idealism burning whilst all about the opposition terraces, that flame is dimming, so he says.

He piled platitude upon platitude in his long speech at KITA’s razzmatazz-drenched launch, but that is understandable. After all, what can be fresh and innovative to tell about a new signing in an overcrowded field. Platitudes, like flattery, are alright if you do not inhale.

However, it’s another thing altogether with respect to other exhalations in Zaid’s KITA-launching speech.

Glaring inconsistencies

Take what he said about BN, Najib, Anwar Ibrahim, PAS and DAP. What he said on these critical matters would amplify the point that while Zaid may have quit one party (PKR) and launched a new one, he has not found a sustainable justification for doing so.

Here’s why. Zaid said that BN is doomed to be authoritarian and while they have in Najib a leader who is by training, education, and upbringing best suited to leading UMNO-BN to implement the agenda of modernity for the country, he predicts Najib will not get support because of the presence of unregenerate extremists in UMNO.

Now, we know that politicians do not expect to be held to all their opinions. It is in the nature of their craft that they be allowed to drift from one interesting proposition to the next in the reassuring knowledge that disproof by events is unlikely. But shifts of nuance in some judgments of theirs cannot be allowed to escape exacting tests of consistency simply because they have to do with critical issues.

Thirteen months ago, Zaid told the inaugural Pakatan Rakyat convention in Shah Alam that Najib would not be able to implement reforms to party and country because the logic of implementation would by itself require the removal from office of the skipper of the crew.

Now, about Najib, Zaid holds that while he is best suited to govern, he can’t do that because UMNO’s extremists would baulk the PM at every turn. In fact, at one time, Zaid not only believed that Najib was unsuited to govern, he publicly asked the then deputy prime minister not to covet the No 1 position because of the baggage that Najib, presumably in respect of the Altantuya murder case, was saddled with. Zaid’s glaring inconsistencies are not confined to his opinions of Najib alone.

About Anwar Ibrahim, Zaid said in his KITA-unveiling speech, that Pakatan’s de factoleader will continue to appeal to the people’s emotions rather than to their rationality, and Anwar would otherwise say and do anything just so that he makes it to Putrajaya.

A year ago, the public record confirms that Anwar was telling Muslims in the country that it was alright for Christians to use the term “Allah” for God in their rituals of worship while some UMNO politicians were adamantly opposed to that use.

Anwar went on to tell Parliament last March that a possible antecedent to Najib’s 1Malaysia slogan was the One Israel policy of Ehud Barak who was PM of Israel in 1999 when the latter catchphrase was launched. And that the common link between both rallying slogans was APCO Worldwide, the international public relations consultants to both Barak and Najib administrations.

When challenged in Parliament to show proof thereof, Anwar, in a follow-up speech did precisely that: he adduced documentary evidence of APCO’s role not only in Barak’s administration but also in that of sundry other national and state leaders with a record of misrule too putrescent for leaders who value self-esteem to want to associate with.

For his pains Anwar was suspended from Parliament for six months. Apparently, Zaid Ibrahim wants us to think that all this are the antics of an emotional leader.

As tears go by

About PAS, Zaid holds that the party will not abandon its Islamic state goal and of the DAP, he thinks that they are gravely mistaken if they feel that they are in a pact that will allow Malaysia to remain free, secular and democratic.

A year ago, Zaid was the principal architect of the Pakatan Rakyat’s Common Policy

From Pakatan Rakyat to Parti KITA: In search of Power

Framework whose agenda, publicly endorsed by the PAS leadership, said nothing about an Islamic state and whose ideological thrust was considered to be the basis for the creation of a free and democratic Malaysia.

Now Zaid says all that which he engineered a year ago in the CPF was essentially bogus, a mirage, a chimera.

It’s piquant that for a politician of Zaid Ibrahim’s blatant and howling inconsistencies, a number from Mick Jagger was used to jazz up the presentation of his latest reincarnation as a reformist leader.

For some years down the road, the musical accompaniment to a possible coda to Zaid’s career may well be Jagger’s ‘As Tears Go By’ whose lyrics may prove fatefully prescient:

It is the evening of the day,
I sit and watch the children play.
Smiling faces I can see,
but not for me,
I sit and watch as tears go by.

My riches can’t buy ev’rything,
I want to hear the children sing.
All I hear is the sound
of rain falling on the ground,
I sit and watch as tears go by.

It is the evening of the day,
I sit and watch the children play.
Doin’ things I used to do
they think are new,
I sit and watch as tears go by.