'Umno will never die' would be the Bond-esque observation that many will make when they read this headline.

Many, especially the party's supporters, but including political observers on the fence and even, sadly, opposition supporters, believe that Umno will always be heading Malaysia's ruling regime.

It is not that people are blind to the ills within the party, and the ills it is inflicting on the country. But like a formidable evil giant that rules over incompetent and ignorant midgets and gives the impression that it is control of everything in the shire it is undefeatable.

That is what the powers-to-be are trying to make us think, and all credit to them, they have been fairly successful.

If anyone who cares about the future that will befall their children and have any thoughts of ideals, they should realise an undefeatable Umno will spell a dark future for Malaysia.

Some would say that is not so. They frequently talk of 'reform from within'.

Playground for the elite

Dr Burhanuddin Helmy (later president of PAS) and Ahmad Boestamam (founding PRM) president) realised that such reform was impossible quickly enough.

They withdrew their leftist Malay Nationalist Party (MNP) from Umno, understanding that their progressive politics would always be at the periphery of a monolith that was a playground (and still is) for compromising, relenting and conservative elites.

But some from the MNP were not so sure and rejoined Umno when AMCJA-Putera was repressed by the British colonial authorities.

Aziz Ishak became proof of the inability of anyone to affect Umno's foundations when he, as a left-leaning Agriculture Minister, was kicked out of the party.

Anwar Ibrahim was the latest of those who was driven by this intention to 'reform from within', driven by pessimistic zeal that Malaysia's future would inherently always be Umno.

But as he found out cruelly and sadistically, Umno's culture is not variable; indeed it is so powerful that it tends to consume and influence reformers, if not regurgitate them as it did Anwar in 1998.

It is true that there are, among Umno's young leaders, Malays driven by ideals and faith that the party needs to change if it is to remain relevant to Malaysians.

But in a party where money politics is so prevalent; where a party supposedly for the rakyat is controlled by a small group of aristocratic elites; and where power is seen as a God-given right, their idealism gradually gets blurred with corrupt pragmatism.

In the end, idealism casts only a pale shadow and 'reform from within' becomes a hollow, meaningless slogan, if it is continued to be uttered at all.

Regime change difficult

Yes, Umno and Barisan Nasional (BN) are powerful. No one denies that. Their close and cosy relationship with the business establishment; their control over all institutions and government machinery; their control over the press and use of intimidation and fear on people means that a miraculous, incredibly large swing of votes would be needed for any regime change.

In the last elections, relatively little separated the BN parties from those in Barisan Alternatif (BA) in terms of votes obtained.

In a first-past-the-post system coupled with government gerrymandering, a small proportion of votes for BN was translated into a large number of seats in Parliament and the state assemblies (bar Kedah, Kelantan and Terengganu) and vice-versa for the opposition.

But democracy, with a single all-powerful party, is not true democracy. Human nature is such that when the powerful become complacently comfortable, they tend to become corrupt as well.

Mature democracies worldwide are all two-party states where two parties normally one on the left or centre of the political spectrum (the Democrats in the US, Labour in Britain and the Social Democrats in Germany) and another on the right (Republicans, Conservative Party and Christian Democrats respectively) are capable of forming governments.

Corruption does exist in those countries as well, but is not as prevalent because parties are rarely long enough in power to become complacent. Sometimes, the threat of being voted out can itself force a party to remain reasonably clean.

Economic factors

For the country's future, Umno must die, and I believe, it will. Nobody thought that the Soviet Union with a sphere of influence that stretched from Trieste on the Adriatic to Vladivostok in the Pacific, would fall.

Any regime that starts to think it is in control of everything will make mistakes and miscalculate in Britain, this was seen in the introduction of the poll tax during the Thatcher era.

As the saying goes, no one can fool all of the people all of the time. Political history shows that states rarely fall due to lack of democracy, but do tend to so due to economic factors.

The Malaysian economy has always been reasonably stable and it has never been pushed to the extremes that made Indonesians force Suharto out of power in 1997.

For Umno, there will always be two factors to consider to make the economy work for the people, and to make it work for themselves. These two factors can co-exist reasonably well during times of prosperity, but will clash in times of crisis.

And there will come a time, when the party is so firmly in control of the country, that it will realise that even if the economy does not work for the people, Umno with all its manipulation and control will still retain power.

Clash of interests

Signs of this are already apparent and will become more glaring as time goes by. And it will breed discontentment among the people.

Even now, as the government claims economic recovery, many people involved in business disagree they know that most of the recovery assists only the clique close to the ruling regime.

When the government realises there is discontent, Umno will try to reform. And thus the cry 'reform from within' will be heard all over again. A Mikhail Gorbachev will rise, desperate to save the party and make it relevant to the people.

At such a time of perestroika and glasnost , however, the contradictions between economic needs of the elite and ordinary people will again clash, as groups with vested interests within Umno feel their power eroding. And being so complacently comfortable, they will forget about the party's interests.

And at such a time, Umno will die. It is improbable that Umno would die altogether and, for the future of democracy, this is not desirable either.

But the party will face what the Tories in Britain are facing today life in the political wilderness, unthinkable just a decade ago.

Hopefully, sensible voices in Umno will be able to curb the influence of those with corrupt intentions. And perhaps Umno will rise again after a successful reform-from-within strategy.

This is perhaps an optimistic (at least from the viewpoint of opposition supporters) and simplistic analysis. But if there is any hope for the country, it has to be along these lines. For if Umno does not die, Malaysia will.

NIK NAZMI NIK AHMAD is the founding editor of SuaraAnum.com

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