APRIL 25 — Slogans don’t seem to work. Lifting bans on opposition journals doesn’t seem to work. Even releasing detainees held without trial doesn’t seem to be working.
It seems that whatever approach new Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak is being advised to use, is falling flat on its face.
This is because they are meant to be, and are seen as, political spin. With the level of public cynicism towards the political establishment at an all-time high, anything done by the Najib administration that does not immediately cut into the very fabric of the institutions he has promised to reform will be seen as spin.
The public has been conscientiously learning how to differentiate spin from sincerity over the last few years, to the extent that any further spin will merely aggravate public cynicism further.
The big difference between the first days of Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi and the first days of Najib is that the former came into power on a surge of hope following the retirement of the authoritarian Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad.
The sense that there was more freedom in the air was strong in 2004. Many wished to believe that Abdullah would — and could — reform Umno. People were generous then.
At that time, it was not obvious to the general public how badly the institutions of state, including the dominant Umno, had deteriorated over the last two decades.
Instead of the general atmosphere of rejoicing that followed the end of Mahathirism, we have today cynicism over Umno’s ability to correct itself. This cloud of cynicism is so thick, one can cut it with a sheathed keris.
The slogan being parroted by members of Najib’s administration — 1 Malaysia, People First, Performance Now — has been causing a fair share of confusion, accompanied by a great measure of disparagement.
Najib’s lifting of the ban on two opposition journals is seen by many as an orchestrated event, as they had been banned a week earlier. Critics argue that this had been done so that the new government could be seen to take it away immediately afterwards.
The release of ISA detainees, though welcomed, is also seen as a superficial gesture that the government is willing to review one of the most controversial and contentious issues in the country.
As was the case with Abdullah, the fear that reforms carried out too fervently will capsize the boat shared by so many power-holders must still exist in the new administration.
Caution is therefore preferred over zeal. Over time, such caution amounts merely to conservatism.
If the idea is to convince the public that the new government means business, then it should just carry out serious changes to its institutions and key personnel, instead of talking about doing it.
If he is serious about saving the BN and Umno, Najib should just do it, surprising Umno, the BN, the public and the opposition in the process, leaving them to react as well as they can to it.
He has to show daring. The fact that most Malaysians do not believe he has that in him provides a stronger reason for him to rise to the occasion.
Nothing worth doing can be without a backlash, and nothing worth doing can protect all interests. That is the point of reforms. Abdullah was too careful about how reforms would undermine what he saw as the mainstay of his power. Tentativeness led him nowhere.
That is the lesson Najib has to learn from Abdullah’s experience. He cannot be authoritarian like Dr Mahathir — that time is gone. He cannot be like Abdullah because we have already had an Abdullah and Malaysians do not seem willing to be as generous towards the BN as they were in 2004.
What Najib is left with, and that is indeed his fate, is that he has very little choice. He has to do to the establishment what the opposition threatens to do, and do it before the opposition has a chance to do it. He has to reform the system no matter what. He has to jump in at the deep end, go for broke, and reform Umno without hesitation.
The trend is towards greater openness in Malaysia. This is not the function of express government policy, necessarily, but because the public is feeling a stronger sense of empowerment than it has ever felt before.
What we may expect to see in the near future are mixed signals from the government. The government cannot act like a single integrated unit unless Najib acts the strongman, not against society or the opposition, but against the system that he leads and that put him where he is.
That is what a reformist does. He cleans house, physically and conceptually, starting with his own. — Today
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