Looks like Puad is pushing for glasnost

 

The word “glasnost” (openness) entered political parlance in the mid-1980s when Soviet ruler Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to bring reform to a fossilised bureaucracy.

So important was that effort to reform the Soviet Union that the word, together with “perestroika” (restructuring), entered the language of political discourse as catchphrases signalling the user’s desire to usher in change.

Malaysia is in a similar period of change and reform to a political order creaking at the seams and needing radical change.

One can’t leave that push for change to the Pied Piper of reform, Anwar Ibrahim, alone.

Since late November last year, the unity government's prime minister has been bobbing and weaving through a labyrinthine political landscape that can upend the most intrepid of tacklers.

He needs all the help he can get from the already enlisted.

Sometimes this help can come from unlikely sources and from not so much a practice suggestion but from an idea whose time may have come.

Gorbachev attempted to bring reform to a fossilised bureaucracy.

One is more likely to get a blast of criticism, particularly of a defensive volley, from someone like Umno supreme councillor Puad Zarkashi rather than a new idea.

There are enough politicians, both in and out of the ruling unity government coalition, who have felt the acerbity of his tongue in the last six months of the government’s reign.

The latest target was Economy Minister Rafizi Ramli, who Puad lashed for being a lacklustre minister, not in keeping with his stellar performances when he was PKR’s lead exposer of corruption in high places when he was in the opposition.

Puad surmised Rafizi was good at throwing stones but not at building houses.

Raifizi wondered if Puad was forgetting they were fighting on the same side of the fence.

The attacked Rafizi had a sympathiser in Umno secretary-general Asyraf Wajdi Dusuki who cautioned Puad against shooting himself in the foot.

Open to criticism

Asyraf felt that with the unity government facing tough contests in six states that go to the polls in less than two months, Puad ought to train his gun sights on the opposition and not snipe at teammates.

Puad pooh-poohed this argument, essentially, by suggesting that a government life without criticism is not worth living.

Fuad was arguing for glasnost, an openness to criticism from any quarter, friendly or unfriendly, which could possess the seeds of a new departure.

While in PKR in the years of their stay in the federal opposition, Rafizi was sequestered from internal criticism by the combined protection of party president Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail and sometime secretary-general Saifuddin Nasution Ismail.

People opposed to him in the party did not enjoy latitude bringing their strictures to bear on him because of the licence he enjoyed, aided and abetted by the then Sungai Buloh resident Anwar.

Rafizi not keeping with his stellar performances when he was PKR’s lead exposer of corruption.

Now in a government where he is not the star presence, he perhaps finds that losing the muckraker role has stripped him of the inspiration to come up with ideas.

Having not had to battle with internal criticism, the wellsprings of ingenuity have dried up, reducing him to another cog in the wheel of the unity government, not the bright spark he was in the PKR firmament.

Puad is right to hold that internal criticism, even in harried times, is the not-so-secret weapon in a democracy.

A dose of Gorbachevan glasnost may be what the unity government needs to find the breaks out of the tight corners of the political landscape it has inherited. - Mkini

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TERENCE NETTO is a journalist with half a century’s experience.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of MMKtT.