COMMENT In a matter of just a year, the wheel has come full circle for Zaid Ibrahim.

The former Umno MP and minister has made a complete revolution from stellar recruit to the opposition ranks, to stormy petrel in PKR, to founder of an opposition splinter party of vaguely pro-BN leanings, and, now, to a situation where he claims his original party, on evidence of its recent jingoistic conclave, is dangerously incorrigible.

In other words, Zaid has been round the block of Malaysian political groupings in a dizzying pirouette, and has discovered that his trumpeted grouses about the opposition bloc was much ado over comparatively little.

NONE Has he from his head-twirling tour of the tsunami-churned political landscape gleaned a nugget of wisdom?

It would be reassuring if he now concludes that "I have seen the enemy and them is us," but Zaid is incapable of such penetrating vision and its salutary concomitant: acceptance of one's flaws and those of one's putative allies, the better to work towards achievement of goals of transcendent importance.

Still, in lately re-discovering the stark reality of Umno's unregenerate self, Zaid achieves the lesser catharsis of knowing for sure who the actual foe is and what urgently needs to be done to defeat it.

That realisation should count as having some weight towards the goal of clearer differentiation between the forces of reform, generally embodied in Pakatan Rakyat, and the forces of obscurantism, represented by Umno-BN, going into the 13 th general election.

If Zaid - as he now says he will - takes his Parti Kesejahteraan Insan Tanah Air (Kita) out of the folds of ground intervening between Pakatan and Umno-BN, wherein reside groups like Hindraf, Snap, Parti Cinta Malaysia and, possibly, a motley bunch led by Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, the lines of demarcation for the GE13 become, helpfully, clearer.

Sometime ago Kita was shaping to field candidates in something like 60 seats.

Combined with what Hindraf was planning - it was bandied about that it wanted to contest in 15 parliamentary and 35 state seats - and with Snap touting its candidates for a spread in Sarawak, not to mention plans by the Malaysian Civil Liberties Movement, SAPP and the Jeffrey Kitingan faction in Sabah, the field in which the opposition is arrayed facing Umno-BN for GE13 looked decidedly untidy.

Thus, Zaid's assurance that Kita would not field candidates in seats where it would spoil the opposition's prospects is plenty welcome.

Umno-BN is fond of touting that the opposition is a rabble whose ideological incoherence would result in their coming apart once they take power.

Only Pakatan's lust for power, Umno-BN contends, gives it factitious glue which would evaporate once the spoils of victory are carved up and ideological divergences work their divisive logic.

More glister than gold

In contrast, Umno-BN boosters claim, their coalition is a tried and tested entity which, despite periodic ructions, knows the overriding worth of their supra-partisan values that hold the group together through thick and thin.

At several points earlier this year, Zaid appeared to come round to this view of the Umno-BN coalition, as the more reformable lesser of two evils.

Thus when Prime Minister Najib Razak on Sept 15 said in a Malaysia Day eve televised address that his government was going to liberalise a slew of repressive laws it had on its books, Zaid, who touts genuinely liberal credentials, volunteered to help out.

Two months down the road, that ballyhooed liberalisation has turned out to be more glister than gold.

When that sham was followed by one of the more chauvinistic and primitive annual assemblies Umno has ever held, Zaid Ibrahim has come out with a change of mind and an alteration of tack.

He now thinks Umno is irredeemable and holds that Pakatan's supplanting of Umno-BN in Putrajaya is a matter of such overriding urgency he is prepared to downgrade the role he once projected for Kita.

If Umno's repellently jingoistic exhibition was a turn-off to Zaid, why hasn't it repulsed its coalition partners - MCA, Gerakan and MIC - which, like Zaid, are known to favour the liberalisation of repressive laws on the statue books?

One suspects the main reason these partners stay with the BN coalition is that the inertia bred by prolonged incumbency is great and the effort to shed it is too radically unsettling to be contemplated.

From that standpoint, there is an upside to Zaid Ibrahim's dizzying gyrations: they are an antidote to the inertia that prevents rigour from congealing into mortis, as seems to be the case with Umno's coalition partners.

 

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. It is the ideal occupation for a temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent.