PAKATAN LACKS TEAM SPIRIT TO SUCCEED!

Ahmad Mustapha Hassan, The Ant Daily

Pakatan Rakyat that came into being to contest the 12th General Election lacked team spirit and the three opposition parties that formed the pact were never team players. Their only common agenda was to defeat the Umno Baru/BN coalition. They had no long range goals and did not know what was in their minds.

It was easy to defeat the Umno Baru/BN coalition in 2008 as the people were already getting disgusted with the mismanagement and corruption practised by this national coalition which had been administering the government since the country achieved independence.

Having been too long in power they were over-confident and felt that power could never be taken away from them. In that eye-opener election they lost five states to the new grouping of PKR, PAS and DAP. That showed the extent of how the voters felt about the misadministration of the country by Umno Baru/BN.

The aura and spell-binding effect for the new coalition (Pakatan) was there in the beginning but this did not last as events have shown.

PAS had always maintained its Islamic agenda and in no time a clash of ideologies was bound to occur. DAP is essentially in favour of the country being secular in nature. This would naturally come into conflict with what PAS wanted. PKR is however neither here nor there.

This only shows that there was no team spirit at all. Without that spirit there will never be team play. Thus there was no concrete binding element to keep the grouping intact.

When Tunku Abdul Rahman, Tun Tan Cheng Lok and Tun VT Sambanthan formed the Alliance Party to fight for freedom, the coalition was based on team spirit and team play. The MCA represented by Cheng Lok and MIC represented by Sambanthan agreed to have the Tunku helming the party. There was no bickering and there was no clash of ideologies.

The original Umno was strongly backed by the Malays and the other two political parties were also fully supported by their respective ethnic communities. Also there were no other challenges facing the party.

As the foundation that established the Alliance Party was very firm, there was little problem when the enlarged Barisan Nasional was formed to take over the role played by the Alliance in administering the country. Again, all the component parties played their roles as team players and accepted Umno as being the leader of the grouping.

Being in power had given the BN the chance to consolidate themselves. It was only when the leadership had meandered away from its original goals that caused the coalition to lose its favoured status especially when Umno Baru came into being after the original Umno was deregistered.

Still it remained intact due to its position in holding government power. All in, the coalition was committed in ensuring that the coalition remained in power.

Pakatan had the chance of evolving itself into being a solid group. But the lack of team spirit and the inability of the parties to act as team players had caused ruptures to emerge.

PKR behaved as if it was mandated like the original Umno to be the captain of this grouping. The party itself was not solid enough and it was there because of Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim. PAS had from the very beginning shown reluctance in accepting Anwar as its undisputed leader. This was not like Cheng Lok and Sambanthan who accepted the leadership of Tunku without question in the case of the Alliance party.

This uneasy relationship that PAS had with the other parties in the grouping had caused the cracks and eventually lead to the breakup of the grouping. A team that consisted of individual players, each trying to achieve glory on its own, will not see the team coming out victorious, especially in politics when they are facing the might and the underhand methods practiced by Umno Baru/BN.

DAP tried its level best to be a team player but the sad part is there was no team at all, only a loose grouping.

Ahmad Mustapha Hassan is a former press secretary to second Prime Minister Tun Abdul Razak Hussein and the writer of the book, “The Unmaking of Malaysia”.