Nur Jazlan feels the election jitters

'My mother is Chinese, I learned to speak Chinese; they still voted against me because I'm Umno'

KUALA LUMPUR: Nur Jazlan Mohamed, the MP for Pulai, is feeling the election jitters as he contemplates facing public anger for accepting a Cabinet position and giving up chairmanship of the Public Accounts Committee which was to hold hearings on 1Malaysia Development Bhd.

“I’m already preparing to lose the election because of PAC, people get angry at me, unfairly, and they may vote against me,” he said in a media interview this week.

Nur Jazlan’s departure from the committee, and that of three others, caused hearings to be suspended until the Dewan Rakyat sits in October and appoints new members.

He said his election majority in 2013 had dropped drastically to just over 3,000 coming close to losing, “despite people knowing that my mother is Chinese and I learned how to speak Chinese. They still didn’t vote for me. And they know that I’m a moderate, and they still didn’t vote for me because my label is Umno,” he said in remarks quoted by Malay Mail Online.

Nur Jazlan, whose father was Mohamed Rahman, a former Umno strongman in Johor and an information minister and Umno information chief two decades ago.

He said the DAP “did an extremely good campaign with the Chinese — excellent” at the 2013 general election, when the opposition party made a strategic decision to capitalise on urban dissent by making inroads in Johor, traditionally regarded as an Umno stronghold for being the birthplace of the party.

Nur Jazlan said his new position as deputy home minister was even more challenging than chairing the Public Accounts Committee.

He accepted the position when the prime minister, Najib Razak, reshuffled his Cabinet, dropping his deputy, Muhyiddin Yassin, and rural development minister Shafie Apdal for critical comments about 1MDB and a RM2.6 billion deposit in Najib’s private bank account.

He said he had laid the foundation for the Public Accounts Committee to function well without him. PCA, which is parliament’s watchdog on federal spending. “The transparency in the committee today is much better than what it was before,” he said, pointing out that its reports were placed online and linked to Hansard, the parliamentary record.

Nur Jazlan said he had taken a big risk in calling up 1MDB executives appear before the committee and also coming under fire for summoning the heads of government ministries to answer for failings recorded by the Auditor-General.

“Even the AG’s Report, you think the sec-gens (secretaries-general) like to be called? You think they don’t complain to the ministers, why is this stupid PAC chairman being so hardworking in this committee? And we don’t have any allowance,” he said, according to Malay Mail Online.

Moving out of Parliament to join the executive carried electoral risks because of the way people voted, he said. “You say you want this type of people, right? Good people, transparent, but when it comes to elections, you only look at them as one of the party candidate