The Malaysian government could have done without the year 2004.

Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi has dramatically lost ground with each setback the general election and Umno election; and Umno bete noire Anwar Ibrahim's unexpected release from prison to turn the party into a battleground for political control.

This in turn has undercut the Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition in office. With Umno leaders at one another's throats and party warlords on the march, all it could do was to cling to office, duck the bullets, protect its leaders, and pray they would not be pawns in this fight.

The bald, uncomfortable truth is that no one is in charge, and that the government is drifting uncontrollably. But little of this seeps out because everything is being fought out within the accepted code of feudal fealty.

Non-Malay parties from the peninsula in the BN coalition, having for so long clung to Umno's coat-tails, are in terror for what is to come if infighting within Umno turns into a political civil war.

The BN component parties in Sarawak and Sabah - Muslim and non-Muslim, native and Malay - are sharpening their knives to forestall any federal attempt to impose its will or crush their demands for a more localised polity.

There is no public talk of it, the media here are famously known for only a sanitised view through the rosy spectacles of the Umno president. Few Malaysians therefore will even consider that all is not right. They do not believe the Umno supreme council is full of men and women who back the former president Dr Mahathir Mohamed, not his successor Pak Lah.

Adding fuel to the fire was the unexpected release from prison of Anwar Ibrahim. It upset all Umno calculations. He has come back from the political dead. His charisma and a deliberately planned campaign to restore him to the heights from which he fell in 1998, combined with his clear statements that contrast with official waffle, have reduced Umno to a state of rigor mortis.

Poor handling

The party has to look over its shoulders before it does anything. Umno did not underestimate Anwar when it sacked and humiliated him, but it did underestimate his power base nationwide and support within the system, both in government and Umno.

That he hit the political ground without a misstep upon being released, and Umno's continuous missteps about him, makes him out to be the man of the movement.

Whatever he does is a political issue. He visited Pak Lah during his open house in Kepala Batas, Penang, and Deputy Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak got political ischemia. He was in Jakarta when Najib was there on an official visit, but it was Anwar who cornered the headlines. This frustrated Najib so he requested the host and vice-president Jusuf Kalla, to ask the media for wider coverage for himself.

The latest issue of the Indonesian weekly, Tempo , interviewed Anwar in depth. This is one of several high profile events that has had Umno, Najib and the embassy in Jakarta tearing out their hair in frustration. Najib forgot he got a higher profile in Jakarta than in Malaysian newspapers, and if Anwar had not visited Jakarta at the same time, it would not have made much difference.

Umno has kept Indonesia at arm's length; its leaders have never showed the kind of warmth Anwar demonstrated during his visit. When the Malaysian government takes extraordinary steps to prevent him from seeing people like its request to President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono not to receive him it defines not Anwar's, but Malaysia's, worries.

It could not be handled better because Malaysia has allowed its ties with Jakarta to flounder. This would not have happened two decades ago, when Asean foreign ministers could, and would, have called one another on the telephone to discuss issues before these became political and divisive.

If Anwar had made this trip when Ghazali Shafie was foreign affairs minister, how Indonesia viewed the two men would have been reversed. As it is, there is not one diplomat, civil servant, Umno politician who can smooth the way as Wisma Putra once did.

Destructive problems

The BN's inaction and inertia is due to the fact that it is faced with so many potentially destructive problems that it does not know where to start. That it must - within a slew of political civil wars, which its leaders would rather not address - only compounds the dangers.

The political issues are severe enough. But there are others. It spent, when Mahathir was prime minister, RM300 billion for a host of grand civil engineering projects Putrajaya, Kuala Lumpur international airport, Kuala Lumpur City Centre, to name just four. This does not include the tolled highways and failed privatisation of government assets, among others.

It was profligacy run riot, without thought, often on a hunch. It is so bad that the government does not pay routine bills. Ask any lawyer or contractor with as little as RM10,000 owed, and they would put the lie to the government's insistence that there is so much money in its coffers, that it knows not what to do with it.

It is Umno that controls the BN government. Its representatives in cabinet are either incompetent or geriatric or both, and therefore can provide neither leadership and responsibility nor a scaled- down vision to get over the bad and hard times. Pak Lah continues to spin his ill-thought out prescriptions and theories, at home and abroad. His cabinet follows suit.

The political warlords in the states strike at will which, with Anwar's realistic appraisal of the present and confident prescriptions for the future, makes for an Umno that could disappear after two general elections. This is especially so when its overall political philosophy is now Islamic, not cultural Malay. Its political directions of the past decade is framed in short-term fixes, not long-term appraisals. It now shows, and it is too late to repair them.

This is its biggest danger. In the Tempo interview Anwar ruled out any notion of rejoining Umno and affirmed his commitment to reform. He raised, in talks with me, the need for a drastically pruned national unity cabinet of BN and opposition in a crisis government to put the country back on its feet.

The BN and Umno would resent it, for they would be the biggest losers in this cabinet; the great and the powerful sinecures of the present would disappear. And since the underlying principle of it is not politics but to set the country right, many heads would disappear, if not into retirement than to reside in the already crowded jails. Given the hostility Pak Lah faces in Umno, he would have to make way for another.

The BN parties may not have a choice. The coalition is so flabby and without direction that it takes little to frighten it. Its leaders have little or no grasp of the ground, which sunder them, to demand answers to questions the leaders would rather not answer.

They have ignored the ground for so long that they owe their political life not to their constituents, but to the fact that there are fleas under the Umno blanket.

The BN and Umno realise it only too well, but know not how to proceed. They cannot rally a ground that wants to have nothing to do with them. Many Malays, Indians and Chinese have moved from the BN parties to PAS, Keadilan and other opposition parties.

The BN counters this with statistics to show they have more members than ever. That the government is cash rich. And that Anwar is irrelevant in Malaysian politics because the mainstream newspapers ignore him. Will 2004 then go down as the BN's Year Zero?