Umno and Najib: Tried and tested, and found wanting

LETTER It was a sad sight to watch and till now I get pins and needles remembering the sight of Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, screaming his head off 'Hitler-style' in Parliament in an unsuccessful verbal bid to ram down his version of the truth to the august House.

He trumpeted the non-discovery, the non-statement, that Umno had been tried and tested. A half-truth trotted out to mislead, what Umno still believes to be, a gullible public brainwashed for years with government propaganda in the mainstream media. They reckon, like the IT-illiterate old fogies that they are, without the internet and its various tools as options.

Not left unsaid was that, unlike Umno, the Opposition under fallen angel Anwar Ibrahim had not been tried and tested and that “the people would not be foolish enough to fall for them (the opposition) and gamble away their future”. He forgets that Anwar was once Acting Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister, Finance Minister, Umno deputy president, and hailed by both Time and Newsweek as the face of Asia’s future from Malaysia.

Facial contortions and a guilty conscience?

Najib suddenly stopped foaming his self-serving hype in mid-sentence, his already loose head hanging even more limply, he glanced side-ways; his effeminate pinkish lips curled in a cynical smile rendered more garish by drooling saliva set off by the specially imported expensive natural-looking male lipstick and gloss. He’s probably a cross-dresser as well.

No! He wasn’t experiencing a stroke. No doubt he realised, in that very ironical moment, that Umno indeed has tried and tested him too and found him wanting as well, like his joke-of-a-predecessor Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, now no longer referred to as Mr Clean and Mr Nice Guy.

This is the proverbial pot – Umno -- calling the kettle – Najib and Badawi -- black. Poetic justice indeed!

Umno too has failed Malaysia, after being in power for more than half a century.

To add insult to injury, they have Najib, a monumental failure presiding over an even more monumental failure. For starters, the Sword of Damocles hangs over his white-haired head in the form of the unresolved Altantuya killing. The devil’s two horns are virtually sprouting from his head on the murder.

Nevertheless, Najib insists on continuing with the job with both his hands and legs tied – mostly by himself – while not hesitating to shamelessly trade on his family name . . . of Bugis and an uncertain Indian – but usually mistaken as Dutch -- origin.

He has even warned once before that he need not hesitate to be like his father, the infamous Abdul Razak Hussein, to stay in power indefinitely i.e. declare a state of emergency, suspend democracy and Parliament for a National Consultative Council (NCC) and set up a National Operations Council (NOC) to rule. However, he would not do that, he hastened to add grinning, putting his tail sheepishly between his legs with a wary glance at the opposition.

Malaysian Spring

The NOC threat, in hindsight, is the clearest admission by Najib and Umno that there are no guarantees that the ruling party would still be in power after the forthcoming 13th General Election which must be held by April 20, 2013. After this date, Parliament and the respective state assemblies except Sarawak, will stand automatically dissolved. In that case, the Federal Government has a further six months to call for General Elections. That would take it until almost 2014.

We can’t put it past Umno to just hold state elections in the opposition-ruled states first, come mid-2013, before calling for elections in the rest of the country. If the opposition regains power in its four states, Najib’s NOC threat becoming a stark reality cannot be ruled out. That would be part of Najib’s strategy to “defend Putrajaya at all costs”.

Neither can we rule out, in response, a Malaysian Spring a la Arabica.

Found wanting

Underpinning all this, at the risk of reiteration, is the acknowledged fact that Umno along with Najib has been tried and tested and found wanting in more ways than one.

It was no less than Kelantan Umno strongman Tengku Razaleigh – robbed of the premiership in 1987 – who last year dismissed Najib as “noted for not doing anything new”. Razaleigh virtually painted Najib as a yellow-belly, a gutless wonder from the days when he first entered Government on sympathy votes from the lunatic fringe for his late father. He remains the glorified clerk that he has always been. These have turned out to be prophetic words from Razaleigh.

The difference between the Najib described by Razaleigh and the Najib today is that the latter doesn’t hesitate to throw tons of public money into public relations campaigns and cosmetics to build up a cult status for him. He has since learned the art of form since he’s unable to get to grips with the substance. Surely, the proof of the pudding is in the eating!

Umno, several hundred times worse than Najib, continues to be the leopard that cannot change its spots.

It was Umno that presided over the searing Sino-Malay race riots of Fri, May 13, 1969 as part of its politics of distraction and disruption.

It is Umno that continues to pit the Malays and non-Malays against each other as they twist-and-turn every issue in the country into a racial, if not religious, one to scare the former into uniting under its platform. Such absolute unity renders it all that much easier for a handful of Umno leaders to live it up at the expense of the rakyat by putting their hands in the cookie jar via the Government’s Licence Raj and filling their bottomless pockets with public money. Their greed, even if the country goes to the dogs in the process, knows no bounds.

It’s Umno that has usurped the power of the King over Article 153 of the Federal Constitution and rendered the Sultans impotent on Article 3 which covers Islam and other religions.

It’s Umno that has twisted and distorted Article 153 and the New Economic Policy (NEP) from its original moorings which had balance and meaning for all Malaysians, Native and non-Native, Bumiputera and non-Bumiputera, Muslim and non-Muslim, Malay and non-Malay alike.

The list of Umno’s sins, of omission and commission, overt and covert, goes on and on.

True, Anwar aside, the opposition has not been tried and tested in Putrajaya. But that’s no reason not to try them out at least once to test them. It’s not a question of taking a gamble or experimenting with the future.

In any democracy, the people have no choice but not to put all their eggs in one basket. This means being bold enough to make a break with the past, still bogged down by colonialist divide-and-rule tactics a la Umno, and chart a brave new future.

Malaysia Chronicle