Without Dr M apology, 'Remove Najib' bandwagon will stall

Former law minister Zaid Ibrahim and PAS lawmaker Mahfuz Omar have set rolling a bandwagon aimed at removing Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak.

Both have suggested ex-prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad as the person to lead the movement.

Unaffiliated political activist Zaid has urged the people to unite behind Mahathir and has even recommended a date (March 27) as suitable for a massive demonstration of public intent to have the PM ousted from his office.

Meanwhile Mahfuz - who is the MP for Pokok Sena - has set the cat among the canaries in his party, by going out on a limb to invite Mahathir to head the 'Remove Najib' movement.

Mahfuz is a PAS sentimentalist who knows that the top two in his party, president Abdul Hadi Awang and spiritual leader Haron Din, are averse to the idea of removing Najib.

Brace for a statement from the PAS secretary-general disassociating the party from Mahfuz's move, though the latter has made it clear that he is acting of his own volition.

If Mahfuz may have invited unwelcome attention from his party's bosses with his freelancing, Zaid's exertions have drawn him more hazardous notice.

Quick to sense the danger posed by Zaid's call for a mass movement to remove Najib, inspector-general of police (IGP) Khalid Abu Bakar has warned that he will face the full brunt of the law if he deviates from what Khalid construes as the two constitutional methods for the removal of a sitting PM: through a general election, or by a parliamentary no-confidence motion.

But Khalid's professed fidelity to our secular constitution is expedient rather than principled.

When some time ago he faced a civil court order that conflicted with a syariah court's directive, he stalled.

The logical culmination

A similar ambivalence will afflict the forces who would otherwise be in favour of removing Najib, if Mahathir is chosen as the leader of the movement.

These forces don't perceive Najib the way Mahathir does, as an aberration; they view him, instead, as the logical culmination of Mahathir’s 22-year prime ministerial reign, a span that saw the removal of several of our constitutional safeguards against an elected despotism.

Now that Najib has battened down the hatches and bolted every door, there remain all but a few avenues by which to tell him he is a cancer that is metastasising so fast that he is a clear and present danger to the country.

The best one is Zaid's recommended method, which is for a massive demonstration of the popular will.

A huge demonstration - bigger than anything polls advocacy pressure group Bersih has ever organised - will galvanise Umno-BN parliamentarians to break ranks and vote their instincts for survival.

Ongoing disclosures from investigations by the Swiss, American, British, and even Singaporean, agencies into the affairs of 1MDB will continue to have a corrosive effect on support for Najib.

These foreign agency inquiries - which are immune to pressure by Malaysian authorities wanting to stem the tide of damaging disclosure - are certain to fuel the movement to remove Najib.

Federal legislators from Umno-BN cannot then remain indifferent to the miasma, especially if it diminishes their prospects for re-election at the next national polls (GE14), which must be held in 2018.

Sarawak Chief Minister Adenan Satem - who commands a cabal of 15 MPs belonging to a BN component - has said that support for Najib is conditional on what investigators say of the 1MDB issue, with its attendant complications of a RM2.6 billion donation into the PM's personal bank account.

Our attorney-general Mohamed Apandi Ali's word is not the final one on the 1MDB imbroglio. In fact, his credibility will be shredded if the foreign investigators unveil more damaging disclosures.

The controversy has gone international, and no locally-managed controls over what the affair can stanch the haemorrhage.

Suffice, if the wound on the Malaysian body politic suppurates further, there is no guarantee that the 'see no evil, hear no evil' psyche of the Umno-BN parliamentarian will hold out, especially if popular pressure - through mobilisation of a mass movement - is heightened.

Why should Mahathir lead the way?

Here is where Mahathir comes in.

He was among the earliest in Umno to see that 1MDB was a cancer, and the most unrelenting of the voices warning of its catastrophic effects.

IGP Khalid can threaten Zaid with arrest, but he can only hint at doing so for Mahathir.

He knows that if he does it, it will galvanise the movement to pressure for Najib's ouster.

This is why Mahathir should head the mobilisation of a movement to oust the PM - but mass endorsement of his leadership is not going to come cheap.

His leadership of the movement will lack credibility without public contrition over what he had done to make Najib - not the aberration he claims the Umno president is, but the denouement his and Najib's critics contend his tactics in his 22-year premiership portended.

It's not in Mahathir's character to apologise.

But mea culpa it has to be, or else there will be no mass movement and no removal of Najib.

This conflict between character and fate will doubtless furnish a Malaysian author of a future historical novel with the grist for the Nobel winning opus that Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi has challenged our literati to produce in 50 years.

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TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others. -Mkini