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Wednesday, July 23, 2014

PKR opts for myopia rather than foresight


COMMENT PKR were being myopic rather than far-sighted when its central leadership council chose party president Dr Wan Azizah Ismail as its only choice of who is to replace Khalid Ibrahim as Selangor menteri besar.

The party could have included deputy president Azmin Ali, who covets the MB’s post, as the other nominee but a proposition to that end was talked down at the council’s meeting on Monday night.

It was not immediately clear that the faction that rejected the proposal felt that Azizah would make for a better replacement of Khalid and, therefore, there was no need to name Azmin as an alternate.

More likely, this faction felt that it did not need to placate the Azmin forces though the latter are doing much better than their rivals in the internal party polls which will end on Aug 10, after what would have been a controversy-ridden staging of what must be the democratic world’s longest ever party election process. The exercise began as long ago as April 27.

If the anti-Azmin forces think they are not obliged to offer an olive branch they are being delusional - in declining to make a placatory gesture, they invite a renewal of internecine feuding in the party which is almost certain to follow when and if Anwar Ibrahim’s sodomy appeal is rejected by the Federal Court which has fixed a date in September for the matter to be heard.

If Anwar winds up in jail on account of losing the appeal, the expectation is that the pro and anti-Azmin forces would be at each others’ throats in a battle for control of the party.

To forestall this eventuality the expedient of including Azmin’s name in the PKR list of who is to replace Khalid as MB of Selangor would have been a placatory gesture and far-sighted, too.

Its wisdom lies not only in the move’s potential to forestall trouble but also in its deference to the democratically expressed wishes of the party’s electorate.

Factions are endemic to democratic political parties. A wise leadership co-opts them rather than excludes or, worse, bans them.      

Azmin is the clear winner of the three-cornered fight for the deputy president’s post in which the other contestants were Khalid Ibrahim and outgoing secretary-general Saifuddin Nasution.

The move to make the contest for deputy president a three-way fight rather than just a battle between incumbent Azmin and challenger Khalid - antagonists in a proxy war for which the spoils were the Selangor MB’s post - was motivated by a desire to rid the top leadership of both contestants in one fell swoop by the stratagem of getting Saifuddin elected to the party’s penultimate post.

Best way forward

It must have been felt by the faction that was opposed to the two antagonists that this was the best way forward for the party, troubled as it has been the last several years by the proxy battle between the incumbent deputy president and the Selangor MB.  

In the last year at least, both antagonists had displayed disconcerting traces of what within PKR is pejoratively termed as ‘Umno-DNA’.

This is the play of ruthless clientelistic politics and the blurring of public and personal interests, hallmarks of the Umno malady that has brought a once powerful party to its present - and irredeemable - decay.

In the last several months at least, Khalid has appeared the more flagrant exhibitor of these insidious traits.

The party is united in wanting him to go but divided as to who should replace him.

The Azmin faction which has done rather better than its rivals in the party’s polls want their man in the Selangor MB’s slot but his opponents, backed by party supremo Anwar Ibrahim, are united in wanting not only to keep the retained deputy president out, but to not even offer his side the fig leaf of an appointment somewhere in the state administration’s hierarchy.

Two Anwar flunkies, Saifuddin and Johari Abdul, the MP for Sungei Petani, are expected to become advisers to MB-nominee Azizah. 

PKR dirctor of strategy Rafizi Ramli (left), adamant in his opposition to both Khalid and Azmin, is slated to fill the state economic adviser’s role, an important position but of no content in the time that Anwar has held it.

It was not Anwar’s fault that the role held no purchase on the policies and practices adopted by Khalid as Selangor’s CEO; the latter is simply not the sort to brook co-tenancy as MB.

But if Rafizi comes to occupy the role, it will virtually be an Azizah MB-ship by proxy of Rafizi, a prospect that would not be palatable to those now doffing their hats to the idea of Azizah as the country’s first woman MB.

Azizah is distinguished by her fidelity to the role - through periods of recurrent travail and fleeting triumph - assigned her by the fate of husband Anwar.

Other than that aura acquired by having been through fate’s mangle, she has little to qualify her for the role of MB.

In two of her choices - one of a Dr Norlela Ariffin as head of Wanita PKR in Penang and her recommendation of Faekah Husin as aide to Khalid Ibrahim - her instincts have been nothing short of disastrous.

Fortunately, Norlela had the good sense to quit after a short time at the helm but Faekah continues to be an albatross around PKR’s neck.

But within PKR, Azizah and her husband, however error-prone in judgment, enjoy Teflon exemption from the vicissitudes that other politicians have to endure.

Pols like Azmin, flawed in character but steadily faithful to the party and, on the evidence of its internal polls, formidably popular are held to a different standard.

It’s a struggle these days to keep in mind that PKR was founded 15 years ago to struggle for an egalitarian polity.



TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for four decades now. He likes the profession because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them.

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