COMMENT It’s becoming a pattern – this disenchantment of retired long-serving leaders with the performance of their favoured successors.

No need to cite the case of Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s grudge against Abdullah Ahmad Badawi as the start of this trend; a man who can swing from enticing Anwar Ibrahim to excoriating him, from spurning Ibrahim Ali to sponsoring him, would be devilishly hard to please in any case.

mahathir pak lah umno 2009 Dr Ling Liong Sik’s discontent with successor Ong Ka Ting’s leadership of the MCA may well have been the start of this pattern of dismay with the protégé.

MCA’s losses suffered in the March 2008 general election sped Ka Ting to early retirement. This saved Ling the trouble of a course correction which he would have had to come up with had national events not overtaken him and Kah Ting, rendering both leaders irrelevant to the tsunami-altered national political scenario.   

The open discontent expressed yesterday by Gerakan adviser Dr Lim Keng Yaik at the supposed fecklessness of successor Dr Koh Tsu Koon suggests that a pattern is shaping – of disenchantment on the part of durable former BN component party leaders with successors they have coached to take their place upon their retirement.    

Devious streak

Now that the perdurable S Samy Vellu of the MIC has indicated he is retiring in January, one has not long to wait to see whether he will join the swelling chorus of naysayers against successors. Samy Vellu has said he will have nothing to do with MIC after he exits.

samy vellu cooperative interview 060709 07 But power is a narcotic, withdrawal of which, after a long dependency, induces symptoms ranging from maudlin sentimentality to a kind of King Lear-like whine against the way things turn out to be.

Long-serving leaders like to tape as their successors bland and seemingly insipid types – think of Pak Lah, Kah Ting and Tsu Koon – who when they show signs of having deviated from  paths preordained for them, are then suspected by their predecessors of having a previously unsuspected devious streak.

With Sarawak’s Taib Mahmud completing his 30th year as chief minister next March, attention would shift to who he would tap as his successor.

If he adheres to the BN pattern of the long-serving preferring the colourless, it would have to be Alfred Jabu. Then we would have to wait for a period to see if the same phenomenon of dismay with the protégé reasserts itself.

No one to blame

If the choice falls on Adenam Satem, it would be interesting to see how a man of his intellect writes his own agenda while swimming in Taib’s slipstream; the latter course mandated by the very fact of his preferment over the competition.

azlan The opposition PKR, by opting for election of its leaders by the direct vote of its entire membership, has contrived a method that should avert this pattern of the anointed successor turning out to be disappointing in the eyes of the predecessor.

PKR members would have no one to blame but themselves should they make a wrong choice; also, they have the opportunity for correction at the next round of direct balloting which comes every three years.

Besides being more democratic, this method enjoys the additional advantage of saving the public the rather sorry – and elitist – spectacle of predecessor dismay with the successor. Vox populi, vox dei .

 

 

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them.