COMMENT With the Umno president under dire threat from a proven career-stopper, with his deputy as quiescent as an extinct volcano, a No 3 impaled on a sword he helped forge, a No 4 disqualified by dynastic and graver caveats, and a No 5 stymied by geography, who will the party or, what is more accurate, its overlords turn to as interim saviour before a new and younger cast of leaders is rung in?

The answer may be Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, provided of course he acquiesces to conditions imposed by the career-stopper.

It is not that this scenario is being discussed with any great enthusiasm in political salons, but if the description of the state of the top leadership situation in Umno is accurate, then conditions are conducive for the drafting of Ku Li, as he is popular known, to the post he has long coveted.

In August last year Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak was served with an eviction notice by Dr Mahathir Mohamad, a ‘stop-work order’ that is reckoned to carry greater weight than an order of mandamus our civil courts have issued in recent times in child custody fights.

In short, it is an order the evictee cannot mess with.

The PM has tried to do a Houdini but the financial crisis portended by the looming failure of the sovereign wealth fund, 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), and, now, the spiriting out of the country of one of two cops convicted of the murder of Altantuya Sharribuu bodes the direst threat to his longevity in office.

Speculation is rife as to who helped murder accused, Sirul Azhar Umar ( right ), leave the country - before the Federal Court delivered final judgment in the case - for the relative safety of Australia.

Australia is bound by its opposition to the death penalty to preventing Sirul’s return to face the gallows in Malaysia for a murder for which there was no motive and where the Federal Court’s guilty verdict is a resolution that does not solve the mystery of why the victim was killed and in so brutal a manner.

The word is that if Sirul talks, this mystery of the Mongolian woman’s murder that has puzzled the country from the time it occurred in late 2006, will unravel.

His mother, Piah Samat, has already intimated that her son feels betrayed at what she said he thought was something he did as duty.

In other words, that mystery of Altantuya’s murder remains to be resolved and the tendrils radiating from Sirul’s direction hold promise of more light that may be shed on the matter.    

There’s no telling what names will sink with the unravelling of this mystery.

A dash for the lifeboats?

But matters of this nature tend not to arrive at catastrophic denouements; sanity would compel a dash for the lifeboats by those most threatened by Sirul’s potential disclosures.

General fatigue at the shrill partisanship that has beset the nation over many years, high anxiety at the anaemic condition of the economy, and deep foreboding over worsening racial and religious ties amongst the citizenry would combine to make the commencement of an interim premiership by Ku Li highly probable within six months.

Of course, there would be conditions imposed by the career-stopper but at 78, Ku Li would not be fazed by them, especially if it means that a way must be paved for Mukhiz Mahathir to gravitate to the top.

But this trail would not entail a bar for Khairy Jamaluddin on the grounds it would be healthy for Umno to place a younger set on an upwardly mobile trajectory.   

Ku Li will be two years older than Nelson Mandela ( left ) when the latter began his presidency of South Africa, perhaps the oldest start by a new leader of a country but a start nevertheless by someone who has always believed that it is his manifest destiny to lead the country.

The past five years he has spent in going around the country, furnishing audiences with reasoned disquisitions on the economy, and on the post-Independence history of the country and society, were aimed precisely at holding himself out an inclusive leader to steer the country out of the doldrums he had warned it was backing into.

His sometime adversaries and allies may now admit that in our current fraught economic and social conditions, he is the prescription that the times warrant.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others.