Najib’s headache over Umno candidates

Umno today is a huge house filled with palace intrigues with each player interested only in securing the most benefits in the shortest of time.

COMMENT

Umno president Najib Tun Razak is at sixes and sevens over the sudden surge of new voters in his Pekan constituency.

I have been informed there are 23,000 new voters in Pekan. That’s 5,000 more than the 18,000 I wrote about in an earlier article.

What’s worrying Najib is that he doesn’t know the preference of these 23,000 voters.

If they are young voters, they will likely reject Najib.

If most of them are aliens, then they have already caused great resentment among the locals because Najib has given them many benefits including land.

Each acre of land given to an alien means an acre less for local born.

That’s why I said Najib is at sixes and seven.

The situation must be very bad because he’s now seeking to atone his past mistakes by calling on a selected group of ex-legislators.

In the last elections, Najib dropped 17 medical doctors from the candidate list and an even bigger number of Islamic graduates, who went on to become revolutionary time bombs.

Umno retained the riff-raffs and other unmentionables to stand as candidates.

From this rogue’s gallery, Najib selected the men and women who would scale to new dizzying heights via his acronym-filled ‘transformation’ agenda.

At the meeting with ex-assemblymen and ex-MPs, Najib admitted that some of the previously dropped legislators may have been victims of Umno’s internal politics.

He claimed he understood their hurt and agony.

Najib allowed ‘scums’ to rise

But coming from Najib, I can say it’s an overstatement. The man has little capacity to understand others. People are of value as long as they serve his interests!

Everyone who came for the meeting with Najib considered themselves winnable candidates.

But how many can Najib accommodate without upsetting the present set up?

It’s going to be war again.

The present semblance of a united front will disintegrate as soon as he comes out with the candidate list.

Umno today is a huge house filled with palace intrigues. Each player is interested to secure the most benefits in the shortest of time.

There’s no such thing as long term thinking or a blueprint for the future. Those exotic things are for the top leadership to think of.

To say there is a huge disconnect between the leaders and the followers is an understatement.

But then, that is the price you pay for allowing the scums to rise to the top and dominate the party divisions.

The writer is a former Umno state assemblyman but joined DAP earlier this year. He is a FMT columnist.