Dr M's ire at what he has wrought

An anticipated relief from having the 13th general election sooner rather than later is that the country would be saved the gibberish that gushes these days from its supposedly retired fourth prime minister.

Its profusion has arrived at the point where those staggered by the drivel would be inclined to harbour the wish that the polls would be held soon and would yield results that would shut him up for good.

On second thoughts, that would be wishful thinking - not the real possibility that the election results would give him the hiccups; it's the notion that there could be any eventuality that would leave Dr Mahathir Mohamad tongue tied for long.

He is the sort of man who even if the imminent polls produce results that would have him plastered, Mahathir will find ways to secrete his offal which if not given due diligence by the media would prompt a round of whining from him that his freedom to disport has been denied.

People who will say anything are often the victims of diminished self-esteem.

But Mahathir teems too much with ego to be suffering from anything like a want of self-esteem though one is tempted to suspect something like what psychologists call projection theory is in play when he recently suggested that the Arabs are not capable of planning 9/11; only the CIA and Mossad have that capability, theorised the former PM.

True, the looming possibility of a defeat to BN may have rendered Mahathir distinctly unnerved. And so Umno's one-time doctor and prescription writer can perhaps be excused for sounding less than coherent lately.

‘We will shoot them'

But his most recent outburst, at an international forum on conflict and conciliation yesterday, sounds like he is close to being unhinged by the prospect that BN may lose the election.

Judging from the convolution that emerged from the press conference Mahathir held after he had delivered his speech at the forum, the man displays facets of the voluble excitability that marked the reign of (the recently deceased) Cambodian king Norodom Sihanouk and the juvenile truculence of one-time Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

Both references in the comparisons reveled in causing surprise in their deportment before the international media besides being theatrical when declaiming from podiums. Khrushchev once banged his shoe on the rostrum of the UN general assembly.

Mahathir isn't as crude as Khrushchev but he shares with Sihanouk and the communist leader their penchant for making statements that lend themselves easily to succinct and high voltage headlines that the press thrives on.

Recall his "We will shoot them" remark to the international press with regard to Malaysian policy towards the rickety boats laden with human cargo that were landing off the Terengganu coast in the late 1970s.

Khrushchev's 1959 threat to the West after Soviet engineers had beaten their western counterparts by sending Sputnik into space that "We will bury you" and Sihanouk's (left) charge that the US engaged in "feminine seduction" when Jackie Kennedy visited Cambodia in the late 1960s, a cultural tour to which the once sybaritic monarch played the gracious host, were examples of both leaders' bent for bellicose posturing on the diplomatic stage.

Digital democracy 

Understandably, the immediate prelude to a closely fought general election is a charged time, propitious for hyperbolic statement and exaggerated comment.

What makes Mahathir's musings on the current position of Umno vis-à-vis the nation remarkable in his evident surprise at his failure to understand the new workings of powers in an Internet-liberated country.

The locus of power in this country has come unglued from its previous moorings in Umno: it does no longer reside in one party or in a power elite, or in one institution, economic interest, media outlet, or popular movement, but in shifting imbalances among them.

Mahathir must have thought that in the course of his 22-year tenure as PM he had fixed the locus of power in Umno and the plutocrats that are empowered to lead it.

He had managed to do that by destroying the hindering mechanisms to power centralisation that had resided in the federal constitution.

Now those mechanisms, in the digital democracy that has flourished in the last decade or so, are gradually kicking back into life.

Mahathir thinks that this revival can be beguiled away from ejecting Umno from the locus of power by the party president dispensing goodies to clamorous interest groups.

Hence the public is witness to Mahathir's ire that this strategy is not working and his frustrated denunciations of the phenomena.

But amidst his drivel, there is a morsel that is sensible in his observation that only Umno president Naijb Abdul Razak seems to campaigning.

Mahathir's speculation as to the inertia of much of the rest of the party is that they want to see whether their favoured nominee is preferred before they elect to be active.

In other words, there are interest groups at the divisional level of the party that have to be bought off too.

In sum, in an anatomised nation of interest groups you can't placate all of them even part of the time.

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TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them. It is the ideal occupation for a temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent.