COMMENT PAS secretary-general Mustafa Ali ought to simply declare a truce to verbal fisticuffs with his DAP counterpart, now that it’s quite evident that the latter is unwilling to debate him and reluctant even to be drawn by the press on the matter.

National news agency Bernama has reported that DAP secretary-general and Penang Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng abruptly ended a press conference yesterday in Penang.

This was when the tape recorder and pen crowd persisted in asking for Lim’s response to Mustafa’s challenge to debate him on the issue of local council elections.

The press is always on the lookout for political flash points, so Lim’s refusal to furnish fodder must have been intended to defuse the issue that had sparked the contretemps with Mustafa.  

The usually combative Lim ( left ) declined to take questions on Mustafa’s invitation to debate on the issue of local council elections though he was willing to talk on other matters, and indeed proceeded to do so.

It says something when the normally voluble opt for silence on a fraught matter, a tacit recognition perhaps that discretion is the better part of valor.

The local council elections issue has been the fount of an acrimonious exchange between Mustafa and Lim.

Many view the exchange as emblematic of deteriorating intra-Pakatan relations while others see it as just another skirmish among a fractious opposition coalition with much to learn how to disagree agreeably.

With respect to the latter, Mustafa could lead the way by declaring a truce at this juncture of his spat with his interlocutor in what would be a display of magnanimity by the older man towards someone whose penchant for the fray is apt to carry to excess like grass overgrowing its verge.

Declare a truce

Restraint by Mustafa could help finesse the point that the DAP ought to think carefully about a third term as chief minister for Lim should Pakatan retain Penang - but not win the country - at the next general election.

Pakatan ought to dissuade occupants of principal positions within its overall set-up from a third-term to facilitate the process of refreshment and renewal of its leadership ranks.

The opposition coalition has to convince the Malaysian electorate that it is not just marginally, not just markedly - it has to prove it is - radically better than Umno-BN.

Otherwise, a niggardly Malaysian electorate would be reluctant to give the opposition the push across the finishing line in its now six-decade long contest with incumbents so hidebound its principals can afford to fiddle while grave issues flare on the national front.

Assessments on Lim's stewardship of Penang have begun to crystallise now that he is completing the seventh year of his chief minister-ship.

Inevitably, he is compared with his predecessor, Gerakan's Koh Tsu Koon ( right ). These assessments devolve around a one-liner that is succinctly telling: “Koh knew a lot but did little; Lim knows little but does a lot.”

What is meant is that the Gerakan man was knowledgeable, but lacked the guts to act; Lim affects to know much, but is not lacking in the gumption to get things done.

Overall, his stewardship has been streets ahead of Koh's but he may find elusive the traits of the standard-bearer of a DAP-led Pakatan governance of Penang in its third-term - activism buttressed by knowledge and vision.

A less partisan and more visionary helmsman in Penang would be a necessity - in the event Pakatan does not win GE14 - if only to convince the Malaysian electorate at GE15 that given the depth of the leadership reserve in the opposition, it cannot defer any longer a choice to ring in direly needed change, assuming that Umno-BN continues to be embedded in self-delusion.

 

Not winning GE14 would require that Pakatan governance in its third terms in the states it controls in Penang and Selangor would have to be brightly shining so that victory in GE15 would be a shoo-in.

No doubt, all this is simply counting chickens before they are hatched, but punditry, like flattery, is all right so long as you do not inhale.

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.