Is Rafizi Ramli a reformer or poseur?

 

From Terence Netto

Rafizi Ramli of PKR has timed his return to the political arena just when his party is at a low ebb in popularity.

Rafizi took a sabbatical from politics in December 2019, saying he wanted to focus on a start-up where he was keen on learning new things.

His stance was interpreted as a not-so-subtle exhibition of personal disdain for goings-on in PKR and in Pakatan Harapan where he was unhappy with his party’s subservience to Dr
Mahathir Mohamad’s leadership of the PH government.

Rafizi’s return to PKR was expected though in the manner of his leaving, he indicated that his sabbatical could be permanent.

On Tuesday, in the wake of PKR’s disastrous performance in the Johor polls, Rafizi decided to return to the political fray, timing his announcement to take advantage of the perception that PKR’s leadership ranks are in dire need of refreshment and also that PH’s policies need refurbishment and better projection.

PKR won only one out of the 20 seats it contested at the Johor polls on March 12. This woeful result followed its wipeout in the Melaka state polls last November where it failed to win a single seat out of the 11 it had contested.

The following month brought even more dreadful results for PKR when it was also wiped out in the Sarawak state polls in which it had contested 27 seats.

In the Johor polls, PKR contested under its own banner instead of using the PH logo. The party claimed its supporters had developed a distaste for the PH emblem because of the alleged stigma inflicted on it by Mahathir’s ambivalent leadership of the coalition during its 22-month tenure as the federal government.

PKR’s PH partners – DAP and Amanah – showed more faith in the coalition’s logo and wound up with 10 and one seat, respectively, in the eventual tally.

PKR’s expectation of higher recognition and winnability for its own logo at the Johor polls turned out to be a mirage. Its decision to break with DAP and Amanah on the logo issue made it out to be a party that is incoherent and delusional.

Coming as it does now, at a time when PKR is probably at the lowest ebb of its 19-year history, Rafizi’s return is being viewed by his supporters as salvific for the party. Rafizi is gunning for the deputy president’s position at the party polls in May.

His supporters hold him in high regard for the role he played in exposing the RM250 million National Feedlot scandal and his analysis of ongoing revelations in the 1MDB saga that began to hit national and international headlines in 2014.

He was then PKR’s MP for Pandan and the most prominent member of the opposition Pakatan Rakyat, which soon morphed into Pakatan Harapan.

Rafizi was minister of finance-in-waiting of a PH government, though he could not contest in the 2018 general election because of some banking laws he had allegedly run afoul of in the course of his revelations in the National Feedlot saga. He was cleared of the charges in the appellate stage of his trial but that came after the 2018 polls.

So now, Rafizi’s return to the political fray has the aura of a second coming, a rejuvenation of PKR’s and PH’s jaded image as the repository of hopes for political and economic reform of Malaysian politics.

A lot can be said for Rafizi and a lot can be said against him.

But the crucial point would be this: How much does he embody the reformatory ethos of the political movement of change spawned by the travails of Anwar Ibrahim from the
late 1990s?

In other words, is Rafizi a reformer or a poseur?

His admirers claim he is a reformer; his detractors scoff at that claim. How to sift the grain from the chaff?

Take Rafizi’s conduct within the party in the years from 2014 onwards when he set himself up on a collision course with then PKR senior vice-president Azmin Ali, who was Selangor menteri besar.

There was no cause for the collision. Rafizi was much younger than Azmin and trailed the latter in seniority in terms of immersion in the party’s struggles.

Wisdom would have suggested that he had just to continue with his penchant for exposing scandals in Umno-BN’s administration of the country and he would have gone up in prominence in PKR and also in the opposition PH leadership stakes.

Instead, he displayed the impatience of youth in wanting to carve out the party in his mould.

Soon the party began to polarise between an Azmin camp and a Rafizi one. Even ranking members with little taste for factions began to resent Rafizi for his unremitting “them-versus-us” attitude.

This polarising antagonism showed in the selection of party candidates for parliamentary and state seats in GE14 in 2018. He joined with then party president Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail in choosing candidates aligned to him. Some worthy candidates were ignored or not re-selected because they were not allied to Rafizi.

After the general election at which PR garnered an impressive 48 parliamentary seats, Rafizi made the decision to challenge incumbent Azmin for the deputy president’s post in the party elections later the same year.

He lost despite the vaunted support of party president Anwar Ibrahim. The party polls were a tumultuous and controversy-marred affair.

Azmin’s supporters were elected to a majority of the seats in the central leadership council. Despite this strong showing, most of the appointed (by prerogative of the president) positions in the party were filled from a slate allied to Rafizi.

This was manifestly unfair.

It showed neither Anwar nor Rafizi had internalised the norms of democratic governance their supposedly reformist agenda for the nation ought to have induced in them.

Observers of Rafizi’s bias in the matter of candidate selection for GE14 and the overall composition of the PKR leadership cohort now saw through his veneer to his core.

He is what in American parlance is called a piss-ant, a self-important, articulate young man who is not as smart as he thinks he is or his glibness suggests he might be.

His admirers think his leadership will rejuvenate the party, especially now when Anwar’s cumulative misgovernance has brought it to a low ebb.

But given Rafizi’s Manichean character and track record, he likely will enfeeble it further. - FMT

Terence Netto is a senior journalist and an FMT reader.

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