Najib – like the man with two wives

Mariam Mokhtar

December is when many people receive Christmas presents.

In an interview with The Malay Mail, Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak’s responses are like the tatty present which has been recycled many times. Despite being given a new life with luxury wrapping paper and a fancy bow, the contents are still rubbish!

In the interview, Najib made a tacit admission that he was an ineffective leader. No politician, however daft, would paint himself as a failure but Najib managed to say that he is a failure. And to make matters worse, he revealed the extent to which he was powerless to act to save the nation, his party and himself.

When the interviewer challenged the PM, saying he was “all alone” and that he lacks support from Umno members, Najib’s response was far from convincing.

Najib stressed “the party is with me”, five times, culminating with the “….I’m not alone, 3.2 million Umno members are with me…”

He appears to be on the defensive and undermines what he was trying to say. He knows as well as we do that neither Umno nor the country is behind him.

The PM mistook the standing ovation which the Umno participants gave him before he even finished his speech, as a sign of their approval. People might have been bored by the same empty rhetoric and so they prematurely ended his speech with the standing ovation. Which speaker would want to look ungrateful and tell the audience to pipe down and wait for him to finish?

It is a dog-eat-dog world and Umno politicians are ruthless. Some people probably know who will be the lambs for slaughter. Were they grieving for their colleague, Najib, who they know will be sacrificed for the good of the party? Perhaps, they shed tears of relief that they have been spared, at least for the time being.

Whether he was naïve or overcome by emotion is debatable. What cannot be disputed is Najib’s ego and his exaggerated sense of self-importance.

To support the view that he has many supporters and that he is not alone, he said in the interview: “……I don’t know whether I’m intellectually faster than anyone. I seem to be running faster which gives the perception that as though I’m doing it alone….” [sic].

Najib claimed he is a runaway success and that his peers have had difficulty catching up with him; but then, he confounds everyone with his declaration that the ‘1Malaysia’ concept is deliberately ambiguous.

For a PM to say that the premise on which he leads his country is a vague jumble of interpretations is irresponsible. Why would anyone have any confidence in a leader who reveals that his policies lack a solid foundation? Why should we believe any of his other anagrams, ETP, NEP, GTP, PTP? Are these half-baked whimsical fancies, too?

Many Sabahans claim that, in the 1970s, Sabah was one of the richest states in Malaysia. Today, Sabah has the lowest GDP and is the poorest state despite an abundance of natural resources. Najib’s excuse for the lack of development is that Sabah is large and inaccessible. There was no mention of mismanagement, misrule or corruption.

Why didn’t the interviewers ask about the latest corruption scandal to hit Sabah Umno and its Chief Minister Musa Aman? When the interviewers talked about Najib’s plans “being derailed by those within Umno, including those with skeletons in their cupboard”, why did they omit to ask the PM about the skeletons in his own cupboard? Najib’s questions had obviously been sanitised.

Biggest blunder

Najib also said the voters “….must trust me…..based on my track record….”. When Najib has engineered the fall of Pakatan Rakyat rule in Perak, does he really think people, at least the Perakians, will place any trust in him?

Asked about his attempt to deal with corruption, Najib spouted the usual rhetoric: “Corruption is something which we will not be able to be resolve overnight. We are serious about it. We have done a lot to fight corruption…….”

He also claimed that he would “tighten up the administration” and accused Pakatan of twisting facts, thus making his work difficult.

Last week, former police chief Musa Hassan (left)dropped the bombshell that Home Minister Hishammuddin Hussein had meddled in the running of the police force. Najib’s spouse, Rosmah Mansor’s one-time close associate, the carpet trader Deepak Jaikishan, whom she considered her younger brother, accused Najib and his family of corrupt dealings.

Will Najib order an investigation into these serious allegations? We have had deaths in police custody, deaths on the premises of the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission and teenagers being shot by the police. Justice eludes the ordinary rakyat and no one has been charged.

Perhaps, Najib’s biggest blunder was remarking that he needs a mandate from the people to reform Umno.

One minute, Najib prides himself on his intellectually superiority and leadership qualities; the next, he exposes his extreme ineptitude.

Despite widespread protests Najib has pushed through the Lynas rare earths refinery project, ignored the Scorpene scandal and dismissed various allegations of corruption like the National Feedlot Centre issue and those involving the chief ministers of Sabah and Sarawak. With his sweeping powers, why is it necessary for a public mandate to reform Umno?

Najib knows that Umno conservatives do not want to be reformed, so why pin the blame on the rakyat? Najib has too much personal and political baggage. He is a liability and is not in a position to call the shots.

The Aesop’s fable, ‘The Man and His Two Wives’, tells the story of a middle-aged man who had two wives; one is young, the other, old. He loved them both, and they him.

As the man sprouted grey hairs, the young wife would pluck out the grey hairs so people would not mistake him for her father; but when his old wife groomed him, she was pleased to see him with his grey hairs, and would pluck out his black hairs, so that they would look like a middle-aged couple. In the end, the poor man ended up bald.

Najib once warned his party. “If you don’t change, you will be changed.”

Najib is just like the old man in Aesop’s fable. He wants to please everyone – both the rakyat and Umno. In the end, he pleases no one, and in the process, he will be that one who is changed.

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MARIAM MOKHTAR is a non-conformist traditionalist from Perak, a bucket chemist and an armchair eco-warrior. In ‘real-speak’, this translates into that she comes from Ipoh, values change but respects culture, is a petroleum chemist and also an environmental pollution-control scientist.