Maybe it’s time for the forever bridesmaid to walk away

 

From Clement Stanley

The truth hurts. It always does. But it is far better to face the truth than to run away from it unless you firmly believe in the story of the emperor’s new clothes.

In a political era gone by, you were the face of the future. You were young then and you had a fresh face. The political ideology that you nourished, nurtured and expounded were in many ways, a breath of fresh air.

Your future back then could not look brighter. It looked like the course of your future was set in stone as more and more greatness was trusted upon you. I should know. I journeyed with you, caught up in the exuberance of an idealist. Four decades have come to pass since and you are still nowhere near to fulfilling your dream of one day taking the reins of this nation and claiming the ultimate prize, the premiership.

Perhaps you were less fortunate than most others by allowing yourself to be the footstool to a master politician who never really wanted to let go of what he believed was his right to hold.

Perhaps you were innocent enough to be exploited and made use of, believing that your day will eventually arrive. It never came. It must have dawned on you by then that if the baton of power was being withheld from you, it would be your right to go after it, no matter what it took I suppose. With justification, your patience would have grown thin.

It was time to make your move. Your camp had won the race for the Umno Youth leadership. Your camp had won the race for the Wanita leadership. All it needed was for you to top the icing on the cake. But you backtracked. You were told that the grand prize awaited you and that you must be patient and that fragmentation of a system soundly in place would serve no purpose except to allow for certain groups of people and a certain race to dominate and decide on the well being of your own race and religion.

The master politician was at work at the assembly and suddenly you found yourself in a corner because what was at stake was merely your ambition, against the well being of your own kind. The fact that this was suggested in front of a huge gathering of political warlords must have created second thoughts for you. You meekly surrendered the initiative to the puppet master. The rest, as they say, was history.

But the ambition in you never faltered. In fact, once out in the cold, it probably dawned on you that you had been played out and this gave rise to the belief that hope springs eternal. Thus began the birth of Reformasi. Again, you gave many of us hope, for a fairer and just government, for equality, for freedom and for better things to come.

Such fiery and eloquent speeches touched a raw nerve in us. Everyone who believed in you believed that the time for change had come. As the momentum picked up, so did the spirit in us. Change was what we wanted. It was in the offing. It had to come.

Unfortunately for you, there were others who saw that this could threaten the very fabric of what was in place. Woe betides anyone who would venture to disrupt what had been set up by the master politician and tactician who had already planned his next moves long before anyone realised. You suffered the consequences. But fortunately for you, your torch was carried by others who believed in you and hence the birth of a new generation of youthful leaders within the ranks. The political landscape was changing.

Somewhere down the line, your ambition, it would appear, replaced your focus. You were now willing to compromise with the arch-enemy, who needed you now more than ever. You, too, decided that he was needed if you were to finally claim the grand prize. You only had to abide for a time, you were told. But your strong supporters couldn’t wait and began to push the buttons.

We will never know if that grand prize was really yours for the taking although he had said so. More often than not, your morals were called into question by the master politician who had gone to great lengths to explain why you could not be the prime minister.

At other times, he sang a different tune by declaring he wanted you all along to become the 8th prime minister. This was politics at its greatest because it all depended on who you were talking to. Still, the ambition in you burned without any indication of it even flickering.

It was more evident in the just-completed Melaka state elections when you compromised on your principles and integrity by welcoming “frogs” in your ranks. Your party lost all the seats it contested.

Perhaps your time has come to make way for some other. Tried and tested, the end product remained the same. So near, yet so far. Maybe it was written in the stars, as a song goes “Why Am I Always the Bridesmaid”.

You can choose to accept that reality, or you can keep believing in the story of the emperor’s new clothes. Come GE15, this will become a call that you and only you can make. - FMT

Clement Stanley is an FMT reader

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.