COMMENT A few weeks ago, Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng did well not to follow through on his threat to sue PAS MP for Temerloh, Nasrudin Hassan, for casting aspersions on the way the tender process on big projects is conducted in Penang.
 
After offering a robust defence of the process upon hearing of Nasrudin’s strictures, Lim, in characteristically combative mode, demanded a retraction within 24 hours on pain of filing a summons for defamation.
 
Nasurdin was unrepentant and Lim, instead of suing his erstwhile compatriot within the Pakatan Rakyat family, wisely decided to let the matter pass.
 
If that forbearance was tacit acknowledgement that Pakatan holders of public office cannot be too sensitive to criticism – even when hurled by members belonging to its leadership cohort who ought to be careful to avoid engaging in public flagellation of principals within the corporate entity – it seems that Lim’s fortitude is finite.
 
Another PAS critic of the CM - this from closer to home - has been made to pay the price of his impudence. 
 
Isrzuree Ibrahim, a member of the Penang Municipal Council, has been suspended from council sub-committees of which he is a member, ostensibly for lambasting Lim at his party’s muktamar last week in Parit Raja, Johor.
 
Iszuree (left) charged that Lim was continuing the pro-developer policies of his BN predecessor Koh Tsu Koon of Parti Gerakan.
 
The PAS delegate to their annual assembly said that Malay squatters on land eyed by developers were being “slaughtered” when it came to seeking compensation from the courts.
 
A check with sources within the municipal council disclosed that Iszuree has been voicing the fears to which he gave vent at the PAS muktamar within the council and to its chief, Patahiyah Ismail.
 
Apparently, his anxieties about the problem as he saw it were not dispelled. Thereupon he gave vent to them at a larger forum.
 
In the early days of his CM-ship, Lim was particularly solicitous of the Malay representation within the council. 
 
It was his style to take them aside and explain things so that they saw matters from his perspective.
 
The approach did seem to work initially, but as the developer-boom accelerated under Lim’s stewardship, the interface between developer and squatters/tenants and adjoining owners of residential properties became more and more fraught.
 
This in itself is not surprising: the relationship between developers and squatter/tenants and adjoining owner-residents are more likely to resemble that between postmen and dogs than other relationship.
 
What was surprising was that the secretary-general of a supposedly social democratic party appears to be more in tune with the owners of the instruments of development than with the proletariat or the petit bourgeoisie. 
 
That is the surprise and increasingly it is being registered by the representatives of the latter class in Penang. 
 
Iszuree’s disquiet is only the most recent and public expression of it; the private murmurings about the CM’s pro-developer tilt have been around from before last year’s general election.
 
Unhelpful to the CM is the perception that as the outward signs of the success of his stewardship become plain, telltale signs of his imperiousness are beginning to appear even as the eastern shoreline of the island is fast disappearing under the impact of projects built on reclaimed land.
 
A longtime and reputable PKR member of the One Stop Centre (OSC), which is the most influential committee of the municipal council, after the State Planning Committee which is headed by the CM, has had his membership of the OSC terminated by the CM.
 
He has appealed the termination, served in late August, arguing that the grounds for it were unjustifiable. The CM has not as yet responded to his appeal, dated Sept 18.
 
Truth to tell, Lim has been a markedly better CM than his predecessor. He has led a government that has been prudent, clean and efficient.
 
The problem is that he is a leader who lives in an era and among an electorate that would only be impressed enough to give his cohort the keys to Putrajaya if they are radically – not just markedly – better than their Umno-BN competitors.
 
That is Pakatan’s existential dilemma. Most of their leaders are better than Umno-BN. 
 
But marginally better doesn’t get Pakatan anywhere with the Malaysian voter; markedly better would get them somewhere – Penang and Selangor, for a start. 
 
It’s absolutely vital that Penang under a Pakatan stewardship be a resounding success. That would count as radically better.  
 
If this requires the removal from the CM’s deportment of features that have latterly begun to appear and cause anxiety among well wishers, it’s timeout for a look in the mirror.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others.