A Crowd Is Ordered To Make The Prime Minister Loved
http://members.tripod.com/~mahazalimtwo/231000xaq.html
The Prime Minister finds public appearances at home and abroad too
stressed for his own good. His senior civil servants think it time he
went. He skipped a dinner in his honour by retired senior civil
servants for fear of empty seats. Malaysian students in the United
Kingdom and the United States question him in a manner he would not
tolerate on home ground. But he cannt set foot in Malaysian
universities and many Malaysian institutions without an army guarding
him for fear of an even more virulent response. Even UMNO members
look upon him these days as a Greek bearing gifts. He cannot expect a
full hall nowadays for his speeches, unless his officers order it
filled by hook or crook. It is not unusual for the hall to be empty
30 minutes before his intended appearance. In his Persiopolis of
Putra Jaya, civil servants must, with no exception, fill the hall.
The Emperor should not know he is naked.
What happened at Sungei Way, on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, where
he opened the UMNO civil action bureau service centre on Wednesday,
18 October 00, is typical. This centre is UMNO's special plan, as the
Prime Minister emphasised, "to bring itself closer to the people".
Somehow, he could not relay that message to those who were there to
welcome him. Half an hour before the Prime Minister's arrival, not
even a parliamentary quorum was present. The factories in the
vicinity were ordered to send their workers to the function to learn
from the Prime Minister how UMNO would care for them. If Mohamed
refuses to go to the mountain, the mountain must come to Mohamed. You
would not read of this drama in the mainstream newspapers; but the
workers resented being ordered to attend the function or face the
wrath of the management. Why were not government officers in the
vicinity asked to attend instead? A highly placed source tells me
that is wasted effort: These rascals refuse to.
That is not all. He visited a college in Malacca recently. Few
students turned up. The hall had to be filled by similar strong arm
methods. No doubt one of the benefits of industrialisation in places
like these is the numbers to make the Prime Minister look good and
self important is there at the doorstep. He cannot attend a
university campus without untoward incidents. He cannot attend UMNO
meetings knowing it could not be filled. He is more comfortable
addressing Malaysia's future to foreign groups overseas, with the
only Malaysian audience his staff and the rent-a-crony crowd that
accompany him the world over.
He wants to spend more time, so he says, on UMNO matters. But UMNO
would rather he disappear into the woodwork. The more he appears in
public, or his pronouncements made from well-guarded, often hidden,
bunkers, the more the questioning abut his competence and relevance.
He has not dared, since the Anwar affair in September 1998, to visit
the UMNO bondooks to explain himself. Criticism of him from the UMNO
bondooks is more severe than from his urbanised cousins. The more he
and his handlers ignore this gross disenchantment, the more probable
of an UMNO Hesseltine to public call for his resignation. Mr Michael
Hesseltine, you may recall, is the British cabinet minister who
called for Mrs Thatcher's resignation and brought Mr John Major to
No. 10 Downing Street.
I am told by more experienced and shrewder political minds that none
in the Malaysian cabinet could be a Hesseltine. Not so. They bide
their time. Challenging the leader is "derhaka" (treachery), but the
tendency to revolt is more probably now than in the past 20 years.
Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah disappeared into the political loop when he
could not unseat the Prime Minister in 1987. He remains in the
running but would not openly challenge now, though his forces prepare
for it. New permutations turn up by the day. The government is frozen
into rigor mortis at this possible act of treachery or bravery,
depending on how you view it. UMNO anticipates a new leader before
long. This suggests a clean break. The UMNO constitutional changes
next month would not work unless it is implemented immediately. That
requires fresh UMNO elections after the amendments are accepted,
after the immediate retirement of the older leaders responsible for
this mess. That is unlikely, in the view of the leaders, who would
not agree to be sidelined because of it. Reformasi is painful, but is
there any other way? So, the charade goes on. The Malaysian
mainstream media crowing to the world there is no prime minister but
the Prime Minister, when the rest of Malaysia looks at a tired old
man, having lost his way, tilts at windmills.
M.G.G. Pillai
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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