Malays being led like buffalos?, asks Ghani Ismail

www.malaysiakini.com

April 29, 2009

Malays being led like buffalos

by A Ghani Ismail

UMNO’s will to fight was snapped at the very top following the losses at Bukit Gantang and Bukit Selambau on April 7. It has long been overwhelmed by contractors and businessmen and can only hope to retain its dwarfed stature in the Barisan Nasional (BN) via off-party means.

The party is apparently in grave need of NGOs, the para-military Wataniah outfit and state agencies like the Biro Tatanegara to fight the battles for the state-enriched Malay elite that is mostly dissociated from the people.

NGO queen Marina Mahathir, catching the call by the UMNO Youth vice-president, Razali Ibrahim for members of his wing to join NGOs, asked in her blog whether these chaps are expected to simply declare they are from UMNO Youth and then expect to be elected presidents of the voluntary outfits.

The tomcat-call isn’t at all new.It was voiced over and over again by office-bearers during the recent divisional meetings. It can’t be such a piece of cake. But rich contractors and businessmen now stud the starry sky of UMNO, many, if not most, winning their way through the ranks via vote-purchase. These are dissociated from the people. They do not fight politically. They do not know how.

Some said aloud they cannot fight because they are contractors who have now to depend on the largess of the ruling opposition in five (or four states) and in one federal territory.

It is this loud song of business distress that’s breaking the morale to bits in UMNO, now flung high as confetti after new president Najib Abdul Razak slumped to the ground following the unbroken losing streak running from March, 8, 2008 to April 7, 2009. He is himself a representative of the traditional and the entrenched elite.

Now unable to face another knockout in Penanti on May 31, Najib is certainly not an UMNO and BN leader who can be expected to regain lost ground. Worse, people are beginning to shun him and soon he may not be listened to any more.

‘Purchase’ and sleight-of-hand is looking like the only ways to regain the lost ground and lost states; like what happened in Perak which finally converted into a gain of merely five percent of Malay votes on April 7 in Bukit Gantang.

That gain was offset by 10 percent of Chinese votes going the other way, resulting in a bigger-than-ever loss for BN in that constituency. The thinking is simple: because a direct and comprehensive ideological dispute is impossible for UMNO to launch against Pakatan Rakyat, it will mean we have to be sitting through a political paradigm shift that will make democratic elections a grand market-place with outright purchases, infiltrations and sabotage of NGOs to counter civil society.

How will that ever work?

Directionless Malays

UMNO is no longer the party that was born in 1946 and which was sustained by voluntarism through the murderous communist insurgency, the main thrust of which ended in 1960.

But after the fight for freedom and democracy, it has now become a matter of furious greed and the party is merely a playground for the rich and connected. The questions members ask are about which Malays the party represents and what the leaders are fighting for, other than for their own business and financial interests?

The party is fractioned into factions of the New Malay, the indigenous Mafiosi with many members without a smear of nationalism in their nature.

The previous president and prime minister Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi could have even made Malaysia to become like a vassal of Singapore, himself sometimes described as a ‘Singapore serf’, a thing unthinkable in UMNO until his tenure.

Singapore was made the anchor of the Iskandar Development Region in Johor and was apparently represented in Khazanah Malaysia and in ‘Level Four’ of the immediate former Prime Minister’s Department. And are Malay contractors and businessmen the answer to the cultural shifts that ought to have been a leap towards modernisation and integration in an industrial and digital setting?

Truth is, there’s hardly a Malay critical mass today worthy of spawning the much-vaunted Bumiputera Commercial and Industrial Community after more than 50 years since Independence or more than 30 years of the New Economic Policy.

The ‘New Malays’, dripping excessive Brute deodorant in their cosmetically sweetened spaces of BMWs and Mercedes, are definitely no match for the demonstration-hardened Marhaens, the Muslims of PAS and the volunteer activists of Pakatan demanding change to secure liberty, transparency and accountability. The government had been run by a dictator in the second half of Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s leadership, the man taking power over religion and the judiciary as well.

He slurped power and decided on his own everything the Malays had held dear or distressful, including the teaching of Mathematics and Science in English even in the rural schools. The result is a gaping question that hasn’t been answered to date – whither Malaysia?  There is also the problematic and arousing puzzlement about where the Malays are being led to, like buffalos in a padi field.

Najib has answered none of these questions. Has he the answers or will he eventually lead the Malays and the nation into one or another form of vassalage? In the given circumstances, it is the opposition that’s looking more and more the likely winner in the next general election. It is merely in need of a thorough cleansing to remove the dregs and the culturally bewildered.

Pakatan represents the larger segment of the people and Najib’s UMNO isn’t looking likely that it shall at all become relevant to the lesser-endowed among Malays and Malaysians alike. These form the greater body of producers in Malaysia.

A GHANI ISMAIL is a former newspaper columnist.

Advertisement