Najib says things will be better
Prime Minister Najib seeks to deliver the goodies to his core constituencies
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak is expected to table a
national budget Friday that will be bulging with takeaways for
prospective voters in an election that keeps receding into the future.
It is likely to include relief for first-time homebuyers and some aid
for senior citizens, as well as yet more benefits for civil servants,
the great preponderance of whom are Malays, Najib’s core constituency,
as well as some additional assistance for people in the
kampungs,
or rural Malay villages. It has been estimated that there are almost
no Malay families without a family member either in the civil service or
the military.
The election now appears likely to be pushed back to sometime after the
Lunar New Year, which begins on Feb. 10. November is unlikely, analysts
say, because roughly 30,000 prospective Malay voters will be in Mecca
on the hajj. Najib also has said he won’t call elections because the
opposition Pakatan Rakyat coalition has announced that it will not call
its own in the states it controls.
That apparently is because Selangor, the state surrounding the city of
Kuala Lumpur, thought to be one of the opposition’s major strongholds,
could be in play. The Bersih election reform NGO complains it’s because
the Barisan Nasional, or ruling national coalition, has registered
tens of thousands of suspicious new voters, some with scores living at
the same address. The Barisan says it’s because Parti Keadilan Rakyat,
which opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim heads, is badly organized and
hasn’t been able to efficiently run the state government it won in 2008.
There may be truth in both claims. But in any case it probably means at
least another five months of fevered politicking in a country
increasingly exhausted, racially divided and tired of ceaseless
maneuvering between the two forces.
The electioneering is taking place in a polarized and difficult
political setting that law enforcement officials should be attempting to
control and either can’t or don’t. There are growing instances of both
opposition and Barisan Nasional partisans burning and stamping and
urinating on the pictures of their opponents, in the Barisan’s case
pictures of opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim and his partners from Parti
Islam se-Malaysia, or PAS, Nik Aziz Nik Mat and Hadi Awang, and Lim Kit
Siang and Lim Guan Eng from the Democratic Action Party.
The respected Economist Corporate Network, the UK-based magazine’s
global briefing service for business executives, in August predicted
that the Barisan would be returned to power although its majority would
be reduced again. In 2008, when the Barisan was returned to power with a
dramatically diminished majority, it spelled the end of Abdullah
Badawi’s political career.
Would a similar result spell the end of Najib’s political career as
well? There has been long-standing speculation that Muhyiddin Yassin,
appointed deputy prime minister when Najib took over in 2009, has long
coveted the job, and any weakness on Najib’s part would let slip the
dogs of internal politics. Last month, unknown people widely distributed
posters in Johor and Penang states asking for Najib to step down and
make way for Muhyiddin to be prime minister even before the elections
are called. No one has taken responsibility for the posters.
According to a poll taken between Sept. 1-16 poll by the University of
Malaya Centre for the Study of Democracy and Politics, Najib’s
popularity has fallen from 61 percent to a still-respectable 58 percent
since April while that of the Barisan Nasional has fallen from 40
percent to 32 percent during the same period, although the opposition
approval figures are far below either of them.
UMNO continues to be hobbled by a long series of scandals and corruption
eruptions. The government has sought to limit the damage not by going
after those exposed by various entities as corrupt, but instead by
seeking to neutralize and discredit the whistle-blowers. The Companies
Commission has brought charges of money laundering against Suaram, the
human rights NGO that has been the motive force behind the French
investigation of bribery in the 2002 purchase of two submarines and the
lease of a third. Cynthia Gabriel, the director of Suaram, was called
in for questioning today on the charges.
The leaders of Bersih, the NGO that is demanding election reform, have
been sued for RM117,000 for damage to a police car which was overturned
in the aftermath of a reform rally in April. The government said the
organizers of the rally didn’t adequately protect the police car—an
interesting construct, since usually the police are there to protect the
crowd.
The most recent to feel the government’s hot breath are Rafizi Ramli,
the strategy chief for the opposition Parti Keadilan Rakyat, and Johan
Mohamad, a former Public Bank clerk, for leaking explosive details of an
equally embarrassing scandal involving Malaysia’s National Feedlot
Corporation, controlled by the husband of Shahrizat Abdul Jalil, the
head of the women’s wing of UMNO. The scandal became known as Cowgate,
in which more than RM100 million from a government soft loan were
allegedly squandered on personal trips, fancy cars, condominiums in
Singapore and Kuala Lumpur and largely failed in its mission to
establish an operation to slaughter tens of thousands of cattle annually
following Islamic religious practices.
Chinese voters abandoned
The Barisan seems to have largely abandoned the Chinese vote. Political
infighting and scandal have reduced the Malaysian Chinese Association
to a shambles. Despite the fact that it remains in the Barisan, the MCA
has lost most of its clout. As a result, the Barisan has largely written
off the major cities where Chinese votes are concentrated, to
concentrate on the
kampungs in the belief that since ethnic
Malays make up 60.3 percent of the population, they will deliver a
national majority for the coalition. In 2008, about 45 per cent of
Malays voted for opposition parties. The Chinese percentage of the
population has shrunk to 22.9 percent from 45 percent in 1957, partly
because of Chinese migration to Singapore, Australia and other
countries, and partly because ethnic Malay fertility rates are 40
percent higher than those of ethnic Indians and 56 percent higher than
Malay Chinese, whose total fertility rate at 1.8 live births per adult
woman, has fallen below replacement.
That has put racial politics at the front and center of the campaign and
made for periodic bouts of ugly rhetoric, particularly from the Malay
supremacy NGO Perkasa, and its leader, Ibrahim Ali, who has made
flame-throwing speeches that come close to inciting violence. The still
influential former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad is the patron of
Perkasa and has backed their inflammatory rhetoric publicly and in his
blog.
UMNO has also sought to exploit the presence of Parti Islam se-Malaysia
in the opposition coalition over a long-standing provision in the
conservative Islamic party’s platform to institute hudud, or Shariah
law, which includes harsh punishment for certain crimes, including
theft, adultery, alcohol consumption, fornication and apostasy. The
allegations that PAS would institute
hudud are designed to
impel urban ethnic Malays, who tend to be more liberal, from voting for
PAS. The party’s newly elected moderate leaders deny they have any
intention of doing any such thing.
The racial and electoral tensions have had a negative effect on
investment, with foreign direct investment, a crucial Najib goal,
actually falling on an annual basis. Net FDI is forecast to be down 5.8
percent in US dollar terms in 2012. As a percentage of gross domestic
product, net FDI is expected to be off by 1.9 percent for 2012.
There have been reports that top Chinese businessmen have delayed
investments until after the election because of concerns about the
political climate. That situation continues despite protestations of
confidence from the prime minister and UMNO cadres. One particularly
alarmist contact – an ethnic Malay businessman – said he and sizeable
numbers of others, particularly Chinese ones, intend to book flights out
of Kuala Lumpur after voting on the day the election is called because
they fear a breakdown in law and order should it appear that the
opposition is close to gaining an edge in the 222-member lower house of
Parliament
If there were actually to be a hung parliament, chaos could be expected
in the Dewan Rakyat, or parliament. Intensive horse-trading would take
place in which both sides would resort to pouring money to safeguard or
secure the loyalty of the minority parties and lure members away from
the other party. In particular, the Barisan-affiliated parties in Sabah
and Sarawak are especially thought to be open to swapping sides. The
chief ministers of both states have been implicated in massive – a word
that is often overused, but in this case may be inadequate – corruption.
In particular, Abdul Taib Mahmud, the long-serving chief minister of
Sarawak, has been implicated in looting the state of billions of dollars
from resource extraction and salting the money away in Swiss banks as
well as Australian, British, Canadian and US real estate. In Sabah,
records show that the chief minister Musa Aman, steered more than US$90
million from timber sales into a Zurich, Switzerland account. If Anwar
is close to tipping the balance in the Pakatan Rakyat’s favour, he will
attempt to entice the two to change sides, partly through guarantees of
immunity from prosecution – there goes his record as a reformer – and
through an increased portion of the oil and other revenues on East
Malaysia resources that are now collected by the federal government. The
two states get 5 percent of the royalty but have lately been clamouring
for up to 20 percent.
Parti Keadilan remains riven with factions largely stemming from the
frustrated opportunists who left UMNO in 2008 and 2009 to join Anwar for
a new avenue to power. Anwar continues to be constantly harried by
lawsuits and attacks. But at the same time he appears to be manoeuvring
deftly to keep the coalition ready for a projected election.
A lot of money has been lost betting against UMNO. In the 1980s, the
party was split among factions backing Musa Hitam, Tunku Razaleigh
Hamzah and Mahathir. Going into the 1986 general elections, the party
then as now was saddled by major controversy including the Bank Bumi
scandal, in which the state-owned bank was forced to recapitalise after
having lost US$1 billion through its Hong Kong-based subsidiary,
Bumiputra Malaysia Finance. Mahathir himself had been exposed as the
architect of a disastrous attempt to corner the tin market, which lost
another US$500 million. The Cooperative Central Bank, established to
help smallholders, was exposed as nearly insolvent because of
nonperforming loans made to 19 UMNO politicians which had not been
serviced in years.
Nonetheless, when the dust settled in the wake of the election, the
Barisan Nasional had won a clear and convincing victory and Mahathir was
still in charge. UMNO in particular traditionally has had the
nuts-and-bolts ability to use government services to get its voters to
the polls. There are continuing – and credible – allegations that the
Barisan has been registering large numbers of illegal aliens from
Indonesia to pad the Malay vote. The party has also always been able to
use its coffers to pay for the sandwiches, the buses, the polycarbonate
for poverty-stricken voters’ roofs, the little bribes to its rural
Malay constituents. There It retains that capability and it will use
them.
That doesn’t put Pakatan Rakyat out of the picture. Sources in the
business community say that businessmen, either sensing an opportunity
or covering their bets, are opening their wallets to the opposition,
giving them for the first time the ability to play the same kind of
Moneyball. The opposition won in five of Malaysia’s 13 states in 2008
and with the power of incumbency and ability to dish out projects and
contracts, businessmen doing commerce in these states are more willing
to open their wallets for the opposition parties this time around.
On balance, it is inevitable to escape the conclusion that political
instability will continue – until the election if the Barisan wins
handily, and well afterward if it’s close as the jockeying for power
continues on both sides. Over the next few months, politics as it is
practiced in Kuala Lumpur will not be for the faint-hearted.
By Saravanan
Anwar was referring to a controversial book The Malay Dilemma written by Mahathir, for which he was sacked from Umno by the first prime minister Tunku Abdul Rahman.
Mahathir's
hardline approach not only indicates that GE13 is imminent, but
speculation is rife that he is now calling the shots in Umno, pushing
the "weak" Najib into the background.
KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 26 — Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim pledged today that a Pakatan Rakyat (PR) government would put an end to race-based policies as he said the current preferential treatment for Bumiputeras had been abused to enrich cronies.
