The journey in life is never a straight line (PART 11)

It was a win-win situation. The Minister got to hand over RM6 million worth of engines to the fishermen. The fishermen could get delivery of the engines only when they needed them and not too early. I got my RM6 million order although I did not yet have RM6 million worth of engines in stock. And Barisan Nasional won 34 of the 36 seats in the Kelantan State Assembly leaving PAS with only two seats -- the first time since Merdeka that Umno ruled Kelantan (at least for 12 years until 1990 when they lost the state again to PAS).

NO HOLDS BARRED

Raja Petra Kamarudin

By 1977 I already owned my first Mercedes Benz, a light blue 204D. A Mercedes is a mark that you have ‘arrived’. Nobody would take you seriously if you drove a Fiat like me. That is a playboy’s car. So I brought a Mercedes, which I brought second-hand from the Speaker of the Terengganu State Assembly who was given a state car -- so he no longer needed to keep his old car.

I paid RM30,000 for that car, quite pricey for a second-hand or used car. But I was paying for the number more than for the car (TC 848), which the Chinese appeared to like a lot. (They say it means prosperous and even after you die still prosperous -- which means prosperous for many generations). In fact, Dato’ Salleh Speaker (that’s what they called him) wanted the number back but I told him that I only wanted the car if it came with the number.

That was the car I drove up and down Malaysia and to every fishing village in Terengganu and Kelantan. They just needed to see that car on the horizon when they would shout, “Taukay Yanmar datang!” That car practically became my trademark. And they knew that the owner of that car could give them loans to build their fishing boats and to buy the engines and/or fishing nets.

I suppose I was like Santa Claus coming to town. And I made sure that all those who came out to greet my arrival walked away with something -- caps, T-shirts, calendars once a year at the end of the year (showing half-naked Japanese girls -- a girl for each month of the year), and so on. (Trust me, when it comes to half-naked girls, those Malay fishermen are no racists).

I would walk into the favourite watering hole of the fishermen just off their shift or about to go on shift and would tell the coffee shop owner that everything was on me. No one left that coffee shop having to pay for what they ate and drank. This was not just about marketing my Yanmar engines. This was about ‘winning an election’ -- me, the new kid on the block, versus the ‘old boys’.

It was no longer enough that I was Taukay Yanmar. I had to be the Taiko of the Taiko, meaning the Taipan. And little did I know that in a mere few months I was going to become the Taipan Yanmar and would ‘clean up’ the market and monopolise the entire industry.

They say ‘man proposes but God disposes’. And I learned the real meaning of that phrase that same year, November 1977 to be exact. And this is how the story goes.

In 1973, Barisan Nasional was formed and PAS, an opposition party, decided to join the ruling coalition. Three years later, PAS decided that the relationship with Umno was not working out so they decided to leave Barisan Nasional and go back to being an opposition party. Hence Kelantan, which was part of the ruling coalition, now became an opposition state, the only state under the opposition (since Gerakan still remained in Barisan Nasional).

Umno needed to grab Kelantan. But first they needed to bring down PAS.

A no-confidence motion against the Menteri Besar was tabled in the Kelantan State Assembly. 20 PAS State Assemblymen supported the motion while the 13 Umno and the solitary MCA assemblymen walked out in protest.

However, Mohamad Nasir, the Menteri Besar, refused to resign. He then requested the Regent of Kelantan to dissolve the State Assembly to make way for fresh state elections. His Highness refused and Mohamad Nasir’s supporters retaliated by demonstrating in the streets resulting in violence, looting and burning.

(Actually, this whole thing was engineered by Hussein Ahmad, the Umno Kelantan warlord, but made to appear like it was a PAS ‘internal conflict’. And the ‘looters’ and ‘rioters’ were gangsters brought in from Thailand).

On 8th November 1977, His Majesty the Yang di-Pertuan Agong declared a state of emergency in Kelantan. The State Assembly was suspended and the Emergency Powers (Kelantan) Act 1977 was passed by Parliament the following day giving the Federal Government power to govern the state.

In March 1978, state elections were held in Kelantan (more than three months ahead of the July 1978 General Election). PAS was successfully toppled and Umno took over the state (and held it for 12 years until 1990 when PAS-Semangat 46 ousted Umno).

Now, at this point, some of you would probably be asking: what has all that got to do with me? Well, as I said earlier, man proposes but God disposes.

Meanwhile, a month after the Kelantan Crisis, on 4th December 1977, Malaysia Airlines Flight 653 crashed in Tanjung Kupang, Johor, and in that tragedy the Minister of Agriculture, Ali Ahmad, and a few of his senior officers were killed. His Deputy, Sharif Ahmad, was then appointed the new Minister of Agriculture with Khalid Yunos as his Political Secretary.

Kelantan was about to face a state election in March 1978 followed by the general election soon after that in July. And Umno wanted to make sure that it won both Kelantan and Terengganu, strongholds of PAS. And the critical task of ensuring that the fishermen in both these states voted Umno -- who form a very large number of the voters -- was given to the new Minister of Agriculture.

So they needed to ‘buy’ the goodwill of the fishermen voters. And to buy this goodwill they needed to give them engines, fishing nets, boats, and whatnot. Basically, they needed Santa Claus to go around the fishing villages with handouts.

The Minister then asked his Political Secretary to find out who the biggest Yanmar engine supplier was. And everywhere they asked the name Raja Petra popped up. In January 1978, out of the blues, Khalid Yunos phoned me and asked me to go down to Kuala Lumpur to meet up with him and his Minister.

I was, understandably, extremely surprised. Never in my life has any Political Secretary phoned me to ask me to make a trip to KL to meet his boss. Very nervously I reported to the Minister’s office.

The meeting was about only one thing. They wanted to know how many Yanmar engines I had in stock. I asked them how many they needed. They gave me the figure and it was huge. I would need at least a year or more to supply everything they wanted. But they wanted all that supplied within just two months, a month before the March 1978 Kelantan State Election.

Whether I got the business or not depended on whether I was able to supply their RM6 million or so order in a mere two months. I could not do it, of course, but I told them that I could.

I got the order and went home wondering how I would supply the engines in two months. They then sent me the schedule of delivery. The Minister would be touring from fishing village to fishing village over a period of a month to personally hand over the engines to the fishermen in a handing over ceremony. It was going to be a big show. And my engines were going to be the centre of attraction.

I almost had a heart attack. All I could put together was one lorry-load of engines, not the 20 or 30 lorry-loads like what they wanted. Hence I would have to perform a sort of magic trick to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes.

I knew that the fishermen did not really need the engines delivered by February or March 1978. Some were halfway through building their boats while some had not even started construction yet. So, realistically, they would need the engines delivered in six months time or maybe even in a year or 18 months.

I went to meet the fishermen and told them that the engines come with a warranty. But the warranty starts from the day they take delivery of the engines. So better they take deliver only when they needed the engines or else the warranty would be ‘wasted’ and may even expire before they can install the engines into their boats. As a 'mark' or 'token' of delivery we would hand over just the propellers.

The fishermen agreed and on the day of the handing-over ceremony we parked the lorry-load of engines in front of the stage and handed over the propellers to the Minister who then handed them to the fishermen as a ritual of handing them the engines. We then drove the lorry to the next venue and the following day we did the same thing.

The same lorry was sent from fishing village to fishing village. Actually, it was only one lorry made to look like it was 20 or 30 lorries. No one noticed that the lorry had the same registration number or even bothered to check the serial numbers of the engines on the lorry.

Our explanation to the Minister was that the engines were too heavy to lift and we would need a crane to lift them (which was true). So better he just handed the propellers to the fishermen -- which in itself were quite heavy already. In fact, the Minister could not lift the propellers all by himself. He needed two other people to assist him.

It was a win-win situation. The Minister got to hand over RM6 million worth of engines to the fishermen. The fishermen could get delivery of the engines only when they needed them and not too early. I got my RM6 million order although I did not yet have RM6 million worth of engines in stock. And Barisan Nasional won 34 of the 36 seats in the Kelantan State Assembly leaving PAS with only two seats -- the first time since Merdeka that Umno ruled Kelantan (at least for 12 years until 1990 when they lost the state again to PAS).

And that was the day my friends called me ‘The Six Million Dollar Man’, a popular TV series at that time. I suppose, in business, you need to show confidence and pretend that you know what you are doing and can handle any assignment they give you even when you do not have the winning cards in your hand. After all, is that not how poker is played?

And now do you know why I do not want too clever people to become Ministers? I could never pull something like that off if smart people ran the government.

TO BE CONTINUED