A catch-22 for Najib

It's risky for him to oust Muhyiddin, but neither can he afford to keep him as his deputy in the party.

COMMENT

The bell has begun to toll for Muhyiddin Yassin. Since he was sacked from the Cabinet, the Umno Deputy President has been relentlessly criticising Prime Minister Najib Razak over the RM2.6 billion donation and over 1MDB’s finances. His stirring the pot at Umno divisional meetings has, inevitably, roused the ire of the powers that be.

According to political analyst Shahbudin Husin, Muhyiddin’s sacking from Umno is now a forgone conclusion. At the Umno Supreme Council meeting scheduled for September 9, a senior member will initiate the vote and, with three quarters of the council voting in favour, Muhyiddin will be expelled from the party.

According to Shahbudin, Najib’s logic dictates that should Muhyiddin be allowed to remain in Umno, he will always be a threat. By making Muhyiddin an outsider to Umno, Najib thinks he will deny him the right to claim that he is speaking out in the best interests of the party.

There is no doubt that as the man sitting closest to the seat of the Umno President, Muhyiddin is a huge bugbear to Najib. His act of going against Najib paints him as a hero to the Umno grassroots. Some Umno divisions, perhaps emboldened by Muhyiddin’s brave words, have invited him to speak at their delegate meetings, and some even braver members have gone on to call for Najib’s resignation.

It must be galling to Najib to be unable to remove Muhyiddin from his position as Number 2 in the party, while Muhyiddin spreads his message far and wide through his speeches at the divisional meetings. Najib may have had the authority to remove him from his Cabinet position, but Umno has its own set of laws, and Najib has now found a way to oust him using those laws.

However, Najib must consider carefully the consequences of what he is about to do. For one, Muhyiddin is seen as a hero, and ousting him from the party he loves will make him a martyr to all the divisions already sympathetic to him, and may convince other divisions to rebel if they do not approve of the manner of removal. There has been a pattern of rebellion throughout Umno of late, with the disapproval and disdain of the grassroots becoming more and more evident with each divisional meeting.

Any political organisation can descend into irrelevance if it ignores the grassroots. Umno loves to claim that it draws its strength from its large membership, but the inevitable question that arises is: what will happen if the members no longer identify with the direction of the party leadership?

Najib’s move to expel Muhyiddin from Umno is risky, to say the least. Even though it will not be he who will propose the motion, the grassroots will know that he masterminded the move in an attempt to save his own hide. And they will not appreciate it. Perhaps he should remind himself that Mahathir Mohamad created his own greatest nemesis when he turned on another deputy prime minister a long time ago.

Whichever way you look at it, this is a lose-lose situation for Najib. He either angers the already inflamed grassroots or holds a snake close to his breast, never knowing when it might strike.