COMMENT The death of Adenan Satem has removed from the Malaysian public arena a politician of power who was also a man of intellect.

Why is intellect important to power?

It helps the power-wielder plunge through the miasma of contention to grasp the essence of a situation.

This ability is a necessity for the forging of long-term solutions to current problems.

Some politicians are successful even without intellectual power.

Usually, these are endowed with that other important requisite of the powerful: possession of what in the military is called ‘night vision’ - the ability to see in the dark.

This prowess enables them to lever men and their motives to the advantage of goals the power-wielder seeks.

Adenan’s intellect was not of this feline sort.

It was more conventional. It involved the possession of a coherent worldview which he applied to issues he faced.

Of Adenan’s intellect I had a fortuitous introduction in June 2001.

On a Sunday morning in that month I happened to be in Sematan, a coastal village which is a 90-minute drive from Kuching.

The state elections were round the corner and Adenan was on a visit to Sematan which was in his Tanjong Datu constituency.

My journalist friend, James Ritchie, and I ran into Adenan and his party in the wet market that Adenan, a senior minister in then-chief minister Taib Mahmud’s cabinet, was reconnoitering for his weekly supply of fresh fish.

He invited us to have coffee with him at a nearby restaurant. At table, the pleasantries quickly gave way to a brief sortie of something that had apparently bothered him.

Scanning the morning papers an aide brought him, he asked why the reported versions of his speeches were not quite what he said.

I attempted an answer.

Almost immediately after, he instructed an aide to drive my friend’s car to Kuching and invited Ritchie and I to join him in his four-wheel-drive for the ride back to the state capital.

I sat in the front passenger seat, directly in front of Adenan seated at the back with Ritchie.

This was my first encounter with Adenan, of whom I had formed an unfavourable impression because of what I heard from my Dayak friends about how he had been hard, even contemptuous, towards Dayak nationalism, as represented by Parti Bansa Dayak Sarawak.

Adenan was a key ally of Taib in the tumultuous aftermath of the concatenation triggered by a mass resignation of state reps and ministers in 1986 that came to be famously known as the ‘Ming Court Affair’.

Gravely imperilled by the revolt, Taib worked hard to quell it, and with backing from then-prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad, prevailed in the end.

Adenan’s contributions had been critical to the success of the Taib counter-thrust against his detractors.

I was predisposed to dislike him but in the motor drive to Kuching in June 2001, Adenan turned me around with a 90-minute discourse on his Weltanschauung.

Erudite and riveting tour d’horizon

His monologue - there was no way, even edgewise, to interrupt the flow - was an erudite and riveting tour d’horizon of his worldview. It was compounded of religion and philosophy.

He ranged over both spheres, drawing nuggets from famous thinkers and figures in world history’s dramas to espouse his standpoint that reinforced my view that an acquaintance with the best that has been said and thought in this world is simply a necessity for anyone wanting to lead a polity.

In later years, I was to discover that only Anwar Ibrahim possessed the intellectual range that Adenan displayed that day.

Adenan’s exposition reminded me of the exchange between a medical practitioner and a friend in one of GK Chesterton’s novels.

On arriving at a stalemate in a discussion between the two, the doctor turns to his interlocutor and says with gruff humour, “I’m a practical man and I don’t know much about philosophy and religion.” Tart came the reply: “You never be a practical man until you do.”

Successful politicians are disposed to being pragmatic; the need to be re-elected solders them to reality. But not to be able to fuse pragmatism with philosophy is a deprivation.

Adenan Satem did several things right for Sarawak in the brief 35 months he was the state’s CM.

Anyone who had listened to his discourse that day in June 2001 would not have been surprised that Adenan did what he did in his brief turn at power-wielding.

He should have been CM earlier for his health was already beginning to fail when he succeeded Taib in February 2014.

But it’s sterile to speculate on the what-might-have-been. The what-was-about Adenan is that he was Malaysia’s first major politician who was also an intellectual CM.

And a good one at that.

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.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.