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Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Futile for Musa Hitam to decry 'due process of politics'



Umno veteran Musa Hitam is being disingenuous in decrying Pakatan Rakyat's use of a statement he made recently that the opposition coalition would not bankrupt the country simply because it would want to be re-elected and avoid being a one-term disaster.

Since airing that view at a Bicara Minda talk organised by Malay daily Sinar Harian and television channel Astro Awani, Pakatan has apparently gone to town with their use of what Musa said about their manifesto in their promotional material for GE13 campaign.

ahmad mustapha book lauch by musa hitam 141107This has had Musa scrambling for cover because the last thing this dyed-in-the-wool member of Umno would want is to become fodder for an opposition campaign that may well upend his beloved Umno, the dominant partner of one of the democratic world's longest ruling coalitions.

The prospect of looming defeat for Umno at the polls and the possibility that what a veteran and loyal member had said about the opposition's plans may well have sped his party to its doom has induced high anxiety in Musa.

Scrambling to retrieve matters, the former deputy prime minister (1981-86) issued a statement yesterday urging Pakatan to cease and desist from exploiting his opinion that an aspiring government would avoid going over the precipice to financial insolvency simply from a yen for extension of tenure.

Denouncing Pakatan's exploitation as a "desperate political measure," Musa urged the coalition to "argue it out" and leave matters "to the good judgement of the electorate."

The problem with that plea is that Musa's judgement is also part and parcel of the "good judgment of the electorate" and Pakatan can hardly be faulted for leveraging it to self-promotional advantage.

Why should Musa's already expressed "good judgment" that an inherent instinct for self-preservation would see Pakatan avoid the bankruptcy that critics say is guaranteed in their high spending plans be allowed to float in a void high above the rough and tumble of the political arena?

Biblical Moses

Musa is not some biblical Moses (with due regard for his name) declaiming from high up on Mount Horeb, wholly removed from the scrofulous rabble down below who are contending for very scarp of advantage.

Also, Musa ought to remember the relevance and application of an evocative phrase - "due process of politics" - he employed in May 1986, soon after he returned from London to which he repaired after performing his umrah in Mecca in the immediate aftermath of his resignation in late February as deputy prime minister and deputy president of Umno.

In his absence, a long and tense Umno supreme council meeting that convened with a plurality of voices for Musa, was turned around by Prime Minister and Umno president Dr Mahathir Mohamad through deployment of a strategic stratagem: the exposure of a letter Musa had written in mid-1984 wherein he threatened Mahathir with resignation from the cabinet if rival Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah was retained for long.

NONEIn 1984, Musa had beaten Razaleigh (left), for the second time in three years, for the post of deputy president and when Mahathir retained Razaleigh in the cabinet, in the lesser position of international trade and industry minister, Musa remonstrated by penning a letter telling Mahathir that he would have to review his (Musa's) membership in the cabinet if the Kelantan prince were retained for long.

The letter, privy to a few, was a miscalculation by Musa and its cunning deployment by Mahathir lent credence to the incumbent PM's argument that Musa had long been threatening to resign.

In Musa's long post-resignation absence - another miscalculation - the Mahathir faction went to town saying bad things about Musa without the man himself being around to defend himself.

Due process

Upon his return, Musa gave an interview to a newspaper in which he duly noted the calumnies and said he would not respond in kind because that would shred, as different to merely rending (which his resignation had caused), the essential garment of Umno unity.

In a classic and elevating phrase, he said he accepted the post-resignation badmouthing of him, which was actually quite terrible, transmitted via poison pen letters and newspaper editorials, as the "due process of politics."

Usually, the phrase is used in conjunction with law, as in "due process of law", or less frequently, as in "due process of justice."

musa hitam wief launch 191006 doorstopMusa's use of the term was about the first time it was employed in relation to politics, proving the point that the fabulous is never anything but the commonplace transmuted by the flair of the imaginative.

It's ironic that the employer of that incandescent phrase of pithy pertinence to another era's affrays is seemingly unable to download its relevance to understanding political behaviour in today's scenario.

Further, Musa must know his call to Pakatan to "argue it out" is limp for reason that Umno-BN fights desperately shy of debating Pakatan.

Would he prod the BN chief campaigner to "argue it out" head-to-head with his Pakatan counterpart, as the latter has long been urging?

These days you got to pity the long marginalised Umno liberal: he is caught between his liberal instincts, which sees more merits on the Pakatan side of the national political equation, and fealty to a party that is almost unrecognisable from the entity he knew in its halcyon days.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them.

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