Guan Eng does an encore with flood aid row

DAP secretary-general Lim Guan Eng has done it again.

In the prelude to the last general election (GE13), his impetuosity in calling upon the BN government to permit peninsular Christians the use of the word “Allah” touched off a damaging, vote-losing intra-Pakatan Rakyat tumult.

The late Haron Din, then the PAS deputy spiritual leader, gleefully accepted the opportunity that Guan Eng's faux pas during Christmas 2012 presented to covert Umno sympathisers within the folds of the Islamic party to weaken the PR coalition with internal strife.

Haron, long suspected as an Umno plant in PAS, rode the divisive issue to the hilt.

The upshot: Pakatan Rakyat, that fledgling alliance of makeshift PKR, secularist DAP and theocratic PAS - a feat of prestidigitation by Anwar Ibrahim that deserved the Ramon Magsaysay Award if not the Nobel - wobbled badly in the month of January 2013 from Guan Eng's rash resuscitation of an issue best left to time to scuttle its irrationality.

It was a characteristic lapse on the part of Penang's chief minister: Guan Eng's political instincts are more sound when he has to prove himself than when he's confident of his ratings.

By the end of 2012, the DAP secretary-general was sanguine about his government's expected re-endorsement by Penang's voters in GE13, held in May 2013.

Buoyed by his elevated placing in the DAP central executive committee polls on Nov 12 - a surefire touchstone for his arrogance - Guan Eng has now picked a gratuitous fight with coalition partner PKR in the immediate prelude to GE14.

He withdrew forms given to PKR state assemblyperson for Kebun Bunga, Cheah Kah Peng, by which flood victims can receive aid of RM700 each to alleviate their plight.

It's a move as sophomoric as Guan Eng's misjudgment on the “Allah” issue which reignited in December 2012, following the CM's Christmas appeal to legitimise Christians’ use of the term.

The high-voltage issue had been consigned to a backburner. Guan Eng's miscue caused attention to be refocused on Pakatan Rakyat's fragile unity.

Fig leaf of consensus

Penang's floods between Nov 4 to 5 had exposed the chief minister's inability to tackle the issue of sustainable development.

One would think the calamity in which seven lives were lost would stay his hand in proceeding with ventures that would further threaten the environment.

Fat chance.

Guan Eng's pell-mell development of Penang Island, especially in the last four years, has invited a derisive twist to his party's moniker: these days DAP is referred to as Developers' Action Party.

On Nov 16, the state assembly passed a bill on the corporatisation of the Penang Botanic Gardens by voice vote.

At a pre-council meeting with coalition partners before the assembly began its sitting on Nov 2, the bill was discussed.

PKR legislators raised concerns about what corporatisation would do to the famed gardens’ environment.

Guan Eng shouted down their reservations, dismissing qualms that corporatisation would lead to privatisation which is certain to result in environmental degradation.

His conduct during these meetings is not unlike Umno's when the hegemon is focused on gaining the fig leaf of BN consensus for what it is determined to have.

Making recalcitrants pay

Cheah had been among the more vocal of PKR critics of unsustainable development in the state, having abstained with four other colleagues, at an earlier state assembly session when Umno tabled a bill calling for a cessation to unsustainable development.

The PKR reps' abstention stuck in the chief minister's craw.

When rebuffed, Guan Eng is apt to make recalcitrants pay.

For that and other reasons, he is loathed by aspirants for leadership in PKR's Penang chapter.

An aspirant has merely to put his head above the parapet for the DAP strongman to cut the ground from under his feet.

This Guan Eng does through the CM office's control of the levers of state power and government funding.

Resort to such help is inevitable if the aspiring leader is to display to the public at large his quality.

That is why PKR central had to send party secretary-general Saifuddin Nasution as adviser - attached to the CM's office - on strategic matters.

Strategic matters necessarily means methods by which to win the Malay vote in Penang.

Anwar Ibrahim had requested the appointment. Sending Saifuddin to Penang was implicit admission by PKR central that there is no leader in Penang of stature to pace Guan Eng.

Needless to say, such a leader, a Malay one especially, has to be found.

Otherwise Malay voters in the state and, by extension, the rest of the peninsula would continue to be reluctant to buy into the notion that PKR is an equal partner of DAP's in an opposition coalition aspiring to take over Putrajaya.

Restoring status quo ante

While Guan Eng will readily accede to Anwar's importunings, this subservience does not redound in the enablement of up-and-coming PKR Penang leaders.

Anwar is aware of the contradiction but can't do anything about it.

To him it's just as well that Guan Eng and father, Lim Kit Siang, are supportive of him on matters of larger import.

When DAP wanted to hold snap polls in Penang last year as populist counter to Guan Eng's arraignment for corruption over the purchase of a bungalow, it took a letter from Sungai Buloh's most famous resident to halt the drift towards an election.

Anwar appealed to Guan Eng to concentrate on larger issues like 1MDB rather than choose to distract the public's attention with a snap election.

DAP commissioned three surveys by a private opinion research firm to find out how sections of the electorate felt about snap polls, land reclamation and housing.

All three surveys came back with results that sobered the slide to snap polls. The letter from Sungai Buloh simply did the whole exercise in.

Now with PKR central and its state chapter demanding the restoration of aid application forms for flood victims to its Kebun Bunga rep, Guan Eng will find it hard to recede from the position he took vis-a-vis Cheah Kah Peng.

It will be galling for him if he were to rescind his decision to withdraw the aid application forms.

Though Cheah Kah Peng does not rate high in the key performance indicators by which the chief minister evaluates the performance of Pakatan state reps, withdrawal of the flood aid relief forms is seen as vindictive and myopic, given that a general election is close.

So rescinding the withdrawal is what it would take to restore the status quo ante.

This is what PKR demands and what needs to be done for Pakatan Harapan, to project intra-coalition harmony in the immediate prelude to GE14.

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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