All eyes on Dr M after Perkasa says MCA greedy,extreme ingrate

WHERE IS TUN DR MAHATHIR ?

Malaysia Chronicle

Perkasa president Ibrahim, who a week ago called MCA president Chua Soi Lek a sex video actor, has now upped the game calling the Chinese party ungrateful, greedy and extreme. The unchecked vitriol has roused anticipation of what Perkasa patron Mahathir Mohamad will say.

Over the weekend, MCA had delivered a 12-point memorandum to Prime Minister Najib Razak. One of the points centered on the reduction of the 30 percent bumiputera equity and another on open tenders for contracts involving government-linked firms.

The MCA move upset Perkasa, an ultra-Malay rights group formed early this year under the patronage of ex-premier Mahathir Mohamad. All eyes are now not only on the response Mahathir will make, but more importantly, how Najib will react.

“Perkasa denounces and condemns outright their request for the government to lower the 30 per cent equity for Bumiputera,” Ibrahim Ali had told a press conference over the weekend.

“This shows their ungrateful attitude to the Malay community and Bumiputeras who have compromised and tolerated because of the social contract in our constitution. The demands are greedy and extreme because the 30 per cent target asked by the Bumiputera represents 67 per cent of the population.”

Sabre-rattling and sandiwara

But despite the sabre-rattling from both Perkasa and MCA, Najib had already reduced the 30 percent Bumiputera quota to 12.5 percent on new share listings in June 2009.

The removal of the market’s sacred cow was widely lauded then and propelled Najib up a notch in the esteem of the financial community. Even Mahathir hesitated to attack at that time.

But Najib’s luck has not held. A series of political missteps and his reluctance to drop his own third link project to Singapore for Mahathir’s controversial crooked bridge has angered the former premier, although officially, both men are still on civil terms.

Although Najib upset Perkasa with his call to Chinese businessmen on Saturday to spearhead the New Economic Model, pundits say his speech was just sandiwara or playacting.

They point to the fact that he has not even detailed the NEM yet because of fear of a backlash from political enemies within his own Umno, such as Mahathir.

“Perkasa is speaking right on cue but basically the noise is just a waste of everyone’s time. The whole show including the so-called progressive speeches made by Najib and the rush by the MCA leaders to please him is the usual sandiwara,” Batu MP Tian Chua told Malaysia Chronicle.

“If Najib is serious, he would detail the NEM first. At the moment he is asking the Chinese to support an empty plan that has not been fleshed out at all. And the wonder of it, MCA has not thought to ask the PM when the NEM will be delivered. You can see now that Ibrahim has spoken out, Najib may put the NEM on back-burner again and the MCA will look like fools.”

Open tenders good for Malays and Bumiputera?

Still, public disenchantment is unlikely to deter all sides from trying to milk maximum publicity and political mileage for themselves. It is also an opportunity for Najib and Mahathir to shoot out signals to each other.

Perkasa also objected to open tenders saying that such a competitive system would take away the advantages enjoyed by the Malays and the bumiputera.

It ignored the adverse effects of corruption and inflated pricing on the people, insisting that it was defending Malay rights although the community - being the largest in the population - would suffer the most from widespread government graft.

“Perkasa will go against the government proposal to have open tender for strategic land and GLCs. This is because the proposal will chip away from the little economic wealth is still owned by the Malays and the Bumiputeras,” said Ibrahim.