COMMENT What must have came upon Mohamad Sabu that he delivered of himself a strange and puzzling speech at the first-year commemoration of former opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim's jailing for sodomy in Sungai Buloh last night?

The Parti Amanah Negara (Amanah) chief must have been overwrought - fatigued perhaps by the exertions of setting up his new party - such that his exhaustive labours caused him to take temporary leave of his judgment.

For Mat Sabu - as he is popularly known - did what politicians out to popularise their causes usually refrain from: he launched a diatribe against the very people he canvasses for political support over alleged cowardice in tolerating the abuses of their present governors.

It must be the wearying labour of the last few months in setting up the newfangled Amanah and driving it to make inroads within PAS’ strongholds, the party from which Amanah split, that has led to Mat Sabu's abandonment - temporary, it must be hoped - of a cardinal tenet of politics: refrain from alienating your base.

Cajole and beguile them even when they appear most recalcitrant, but he should have resisted from publicly rebuking the whole lot.

This seems to be what Mat Sabu did while speaking to something like 1,000 opposition party members and supporters who turned up at the Sungai Buloh Prison last night to mark the first-year anniversary of Anwar's second incarceration for sodomy.

Perhaps because he felt he was speaking to the converted, Sabu was unconstrained in allowing his frustrations free rein.

This website reports that as reaction to his stinging avowal, “We are all cowards, admit it,” he received resounding affirmation from the crowd.

Self-flagellation comes easy when you are trying to project what faults you rue in others by including yourself among the targets of your ire - which is rather like bad workmen blaming their tools.

Mat Sabu injected melodrama into his jeremiad by, it is reported, hurling the microphone on to the stage backdrop before walking off the dais.

A weary spirit

His concluding cry, “Let's rise up”, uttered before he stormed off the stage must have issued from a spirit weary from the apparent futility of past exertions more than from the sense of victory as imminent.

Gatherings such as the one organised by the opposition last night are necessary to keep the flame of change (reformasi) burning.

But if these veer into demonstrations of self-flagellation or general flagellation of the public on account of sundry defects, they will be more off-putting than galvanising.

They will show up the leadership of the opposition as depleted rather than inspirited.

More importantly, in blaming the public for the continuance in power of an increasingly repressive Umno-BN, this tendency will expose them as self-delusional about what causes the Malaysian polity to be caught in a warp from which it vainly struggles to be freed.

Anwar had been in an Umno ruling structure for 16 years (1982-1998) that had arrogated to itself a successively accretion of the power that went on to corrupt its wielders.

Mat Sabu was an ardent enthusiast of rule by Islamic jurists in the first flush of Ayatollah Khomeini's Iranian experiment some four decades back only for him to realise - too late - that its imitation by PAS had eventuated in his and his fellow progressives' defeat in a tussle for power in the party last year.

It can be deduced from Mat Sabu's laments last night that the formation of the PAS splinter Amanah is not going as swimmingly as they may have initially expected - hence, his cri de coeur (passionate complaint).

For someone who has endured Internal Security Act (ISA) detention and other forms of discouragement and harassment by the powers-that-be in a long career in opposition politics, it is understandable that Mat Sabu should feel weary.

Particularly someone like him who has admirably resisted the temptations of supremacist readings of his creed and racialist tinges to his former party's politics.

Even with those laudable aspects to his political journey as prologue, Mat Sabu is not going to trumpet his party's position on, say, unilateral conversion of minors, or that the federal constitution posits a secular polity, with only a faint bow to Islam as the religion of the federation.

Would others be justified in imputing 'cowardice' to him if he and Amanah avoid saying what their positions on these questions are or slipside over them in deference to Islamic supremacists?

The opposition will only be ready to take over Putrajaya after it has met and defeated the demons some of its principals have helped engender.

Until then, it's best to avoid any flagellations of the self or others.

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.