COMMENT Disporting like it’s the morning after a late night, Zaid Ibrahim’s latest salvoes against the PKR leadership expose him clearly as pushing to be sacked: it furnishes him the justification he needs to set up a new party.

With his track record, Zaid would be hard put to join an established opposition party; the later are necessarily wary of stormy petrels.

So Zaid will spit darts from his blow gun at targets in PKR such that the latter can only tolerate him to the peril of party discipline.

azlan Calling on supremo Anwar Ibrahim and Azmin Ali to leave the party because he claimed the two are the root of its problems, Zaid, who yesterday announced his withdrawal from the race for the PKR No 2 position, will continue to heap scorn on both targets until the leadership finds that it would have been easier, in retrospect, to keep the provocatively recalcitrant Zulkifli Nordin than to keep Zaid.

That is the price the party is going to pay, not for inviting Zaid to join in the first place but for allowing the contest for party No 2 to proceed when there were clear prior indications that it would be extremely divisive.

It’s dismaying that for a party with PKR’s ambitions to be first among equals in a Pakatan Rakyat coalition intent on taking over the reins of the federal government, the choice of who should be No 2 should narrow to one between somebody who is essentially an apparatchik and one who is now a proven dilettante.

Nobody talks of the third contestant for the position, Mustapha Kamil Ayub, as a factor but even he sees irregularities in the electoral process enough to demand that it be suspended.

Unmitigated PR disaster

What the party is looking at is an unmitigated public relations disaster.

What was supposed to be a unique exercise in direct voting by 400,000 members for the party’s principal office-bearers very quickly descended into an exercise in navel-gazing, attended by mutual recrimination and myopia.

No even PKR’s enemies could have contrived a script this damaging to the party that is faced with a state election in Sarawak and a general election that many expect will be held simultaneously with the state polls.

All this is happening just when the Malaysian electorate is beginning to get used to the notion that the opposition deserves a turn at Putrajaya.

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.

Zaid - frustrated reformer or sore loser?