Netto cautions Mat Sabu

September 3, 2011

Netto cautions Mat Sabu: Do not now dissipate Pakatan Rakyat’s gains with folksy imprudence.

Terence Netto@http://www.malaysiakini.com
Sep 3, 11
5:08pm

PAS Deputy President Mohamed Sabu likes, with good reason, to think himself a politician of the ordinary Malaysian – a veritable Mat Public, if you like.

His popularity derives from this ordinariness and his confidence in its adequacy to meet the challenges that accrue to his role as aspirant for the mantle of national governance. The moniker, Mat Sabu – by which he is popularly called – promotes this image of him as a politician of the common man.

But ‘ordinariness’ does not mean he is mundane which could beguile one into thinking that Sabu is a merely a politician of likeable personality and limited range. His oratorical skills, for which he is highly regarded by his throng of supporters transcending racial lines, are suited for the stump, but his content is apt to be forgotten though not his delivery which is valued for its comic touches and the timing of its barbs.

However, Sabu is not just an entertaining speaker. He has the ability to immerse himself in a situation that he wants to get a feel of, the better to come up with a sense of what works and what does not.

His election in June as PAS Deputy President, beating the more cerebral incumbent Nasharuddin Mat Isa and the more religiously credentialed Tuan Ibrahim Tuan Man, must have bolstered Sabu’s confidence that his listening-post where he takes soundings from not only the PAS faithful but also the national electorate is pretty sensitive.

Otherwise he could not possibly have made the No 2 position in his party after three years of underemployment, inhabiting the wilderness that is the lot of opposition luminaries who failed to get elected in the general election of March 2008 and were unsuccessful in their own party’s polls thereafter (Sabu did not get elected in his first try at the deputy presidency in party elections in June 2009).

History furnishes many examples of leaders who have inhabited that romantic stretch called the political wilderness only to return with a bang. It would be a stretch to describe Sabu’s successful try at the deputy presidency last June as a stirring comeback from the wilderness except to say that defeat would have relegated him to the certainty of contesting a difficult-to-win seat in the fast approaching 13th general election at which failure would have ensured his oblivion.

In the event, Sabu’s victory was ballast thrown to a good swimmer caught in unusually stormy waters. That is probably why he has used the few months since his election to the No 2 post in the country’s biggest Islamic party as a platform to vent unconventional views, confident these opinions would resound among opinion makers and in places to which Sabu, as a people’s politico, is wired into.

Frank but injudicious remarks

Sabu’s style does resemble that of late Abdurrahman Wahid, the popular Indonesian leader of the Nadhlatul Ulama (NU), who became president in 1999 by default and finding himself in that unaccustomed position, could not restrain his instinct for plain speaking.

The upshot: ‘Gus Dur’, as Abdurrahman was popularly called, made many frank but injudicious remarks, causing needless offense in several quarters such that leaders of other parties who did not exactly dislike Gus Dur, ganged up in Parliament to jettison him in 2001 when a corruption scandal, to which Abdurrahman was not directly tied, broke out on his watch.

Abdurrahman was sunk just two years after getting into harness, done in by his penchant for injudicious candor than by any suggestion of incompetence.

This was a pity because a presidency that had begun with refreshing dollops of truth-telling came unstuck by an excess of it, underscoring a lesson of Shakespearean tragedy: we are apt to be felled by the distortion of our virtues than by our weaknesses.

Mohamad Sabu is without doubt a breath of fresh air in Malaysian politics but he has to reconcile himself to the conduciveness of the moment upon which effective leadership is dependent: he’s got to pace his purposes to events that predispose the public to support them.

Questions such as who really speeded the British to grant independence to Malaya, like who triggered the May 13, 1969 race riots, are issues that have been glimmering in the distance. These issues await a conducive event or two before they can detonate along the interface between pressing current concerns and the spawning grounds of the past.

Getting way ahead of the detonators places the positions gained with much sweat by the opposition coalition Sabu helps lead at undue risk. The ISA-detained Sabu did pay in sweat for the vantages obtained; he should not now dissipate the gains with folksy imprudence.