COMMENT After months of prodding Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak to quit over alleged gross mishandling of sovereign wealth fund 1MDB, Umno’s prolific selector, not to mention destroyer, of prime ministers, finally admits he cannot, without mass help, oust his latest quarry.
Yesterday, Dr Mahathir Mohamad urged the people to rise as one to get rid of Najib.
The voicing of proximate, if not really identical, sentiments have run several people in the past two years afoul of the Sedition Act.
The latest apparent transgressor is Tian Chua, the PKR vice-president, who earlier this week was asked by the High Court to make his defence for expressing allegedly seditious statements shortly after the last general election.
The words Mahathir uttered yesterday to the press, after an ominous round of questioning by police who interviewed him at his office in the Perdana Leadership Foundation in Putrajaya, were almost a carbon copy of what the PKR activist is alleged to have said in May 2013.
By saying what he said, Mahathir had hurled down the gauntlet at the Najib administration.
Willingness to go to prison?
His quip - “Maybe, we’ll share the same cell” - on the possibility of his jailing in Sungei Buloh, where his sometime protege-cum-longtime nemesis, Anwar Ibrahim, is resident, was supposed to be indicative of his willingness to go to prison for his latest outburst.
The sardonic remark served also as pertinent commentary on a feature of Malaysian politics, where shifting circumstances contrive to compel former enemies to come together.
Charles de Gaulle’s dictum on the permanence of interests and the transitoriness of friendships in political calculations has a Malaysian application only slightly less salient than that oriental gem: “May you live in interesting times.”
Indeed, it is interesting times when a man who owed his rise in politics to the benevolence of the father of his present target turns out to want to depose the son.
And if things come to a pass that under the son, the father’s beneficiary is arrested and charged with sedition, then the tragic-comic circle of Malaysian politics would be complete.
But no one would be edified by this tragicomedy if it is not recognised that such a bizarre denouement could only have been brought by a void in the principles of the personalities involved in the political saga.
Mahathir is loathe to admit it, but Najib is not an aberration but the logical culmination of processes he set in motion during his prolonged 22-year occupation of the Umno presidency and Malaysian premiership.
If now he is asking for the opposition’s help in ousting the PM, it should be accompanied by an admission that he has helped engender a hydra.
It will not do merely to cut off the hydra’s head; the system must be uprooted.
It’s not in Dr M's character to admit error and that, ultimately, is the problem with this brilliant but deeply flawed leader.
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.
