Anwar is not helping his cause through mawkish sentiment

Clearly chagrined by accusations he is being nepotic, PKR president-elect Anwar Ibrahim has responded with counter-arguments that are embarrassingly vacuous.

A higher standard ought to have been de rigueur from the author of the Asian Renaissance, the 1996 book in which he attempts to draw on the continent's intellectual and moral patrimony – grist that he argued ought to fuel the continent's quest for prosperity.

Instead, to the charges he and an oligarchic coterie in PKR are practicising nepotism by not getting either his wife or daughter to vacate a seat for him to return to Parliament, Anwar has reacted with arguments that are threadbare to the point of vacuity.

The slew of responses he gave vent to in a speech in Kuala Lumpur yesterday – remarks so addled as to be embarrassing if retailed in direct quotation – Anwar said nobody charged the family with nepotism when his wife Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail and daughter Nurul Izzah Anwar were pitchforked into the political arena after his detention and humiliation in 1998 by Umno and its then-leader, Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad.

Sure, nobody charged the Aquino family with nepotism when homemaker Corazon was catapulted into the political arena after husband Benigno was assassinated on the Manila Airport tarmac in 1983; nobody said anything similar when Benazir Bhutto was pushed to the leadership of the Pakistan People's Party after her father Zulkifar Ali was hanged in 1979; ditto for the Aung San family when daughter Suu Kyi was pressed to lead the democratic movement in Myanmar in the late 1980s when she returned from abroad to look after her dying mother.

In postcolonial societies, the blood relations of iconic leaders are shoved into leadership positions of opposition movements, particularly when these find themselves abruptly bereft of their rallying icons.

It is a reflection of the underdeveloped nature of the societies that this substitution occurs; a more mature polity would be averse to dynastic proclivity.

With respect to PKR, it must be noted it was formed in April 1999 in clarion aversion to the corruption, cronyism and nepotism that had come to befoul the second decade of Mahathir's tenancy of the presidency of Umno and prime ministership of Malaysia.

Thus, it behoves PKR, nearing the end of the second decade of its existence, with the largest number of MPs propping up the newly-ruling coalition, to be particularly sensitive over-replicating the traits that were the bane of the later years of Mahathir's first tenure.

A leader of Anwar's intellection – probably the only Islamist politician with an awareness of the thought of Reinhold Niebuhr, a Christian theologian who was the 20th century's matchless discerner of the corruptive consequences of power – cannot be blasé about the accusations he has opened himself up to by not obliging his wife or his daughter to give up their seats for him.

A probable threesome from the same nuclear family as members of Malaysia's lower house cannot be countenanced, even if they are from a party that had not been erected on a plank of aversion to nepotism.

After prison

From a democratic standpoint, the stance is not sustainable.

Nothing has dimmed Anwar's lustre as prime minister material more than how he has conducted himself and what he has said in the four months since he was released from prison.

His grovelling before royals; his distaste for the disclosure of the extent of financial turpitude in the deposed Najib Abdul Razak government; his opposition to Thommy Thomas' nomination as Attorney General and then – when the Agong consented to it after some dithering – his pretence of having intervened positively in the matter; his bogus neutrality in the internecine strife in PKR; and, in what is a nadir of sorts, his equivocation before a Singapore audience on the possibility of future negotiations with the now thoroughly discredited Umno – all point to a distressing vacancy where intellectual substantiveness was presumed.

Incipient suspicion of his hollowness has repulsed former admirers; their consequent criticism eliciting a mawkish sentimentalism from Anwar, as witness his remarks at a public rally yesterday.

To be sure, there is nothing wrong with being ambitious for prime ministerial office. No one who covets the highest office in the land can hope to achieve it on low-octane ambition.

But the will to power must be accompanied by an ethic that rises above personal expediency and is based on public interest.

Since the time he pushed for his wife to be menteri besar of Selangor in 2014, Anwar has displayed an expedient more than a principled attachment to this ethic.

A true exponent of Reformasi would have had the balance in reverse.

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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