Rudyard Kipling"
āWhen you're left wounded on Afganistan's plains and
the women come out to cut up what remains, Just roll to your rifle
and blow out your brains,
And go to your God like a soldierā
General Douglas MacArthur"
āWe are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.ā
āIt is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.ā āOld soldiers never die; they just fade away.
āThe soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.ā
āMay God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .ā āThe object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
āNobody ever defended, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
āIt is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
The Soldier stood and faced God
Which must always come to pass
He hoped his shoes were shining
Just as bright as his brass
"Step forward you Soldier,
How shall I deal with you?
Have you always turned the other cheek?
To My Church have you been true?"
"No, Lord, I guess I ain't
Because those of us who carry guns
Can't always be a saint."
I've had to work on Sundays
And at times my talk was tough,
And sometimes I've been violent,
Because the world is awfully rough.
But, I never took a penny
That wasn't mine to keep.
Though I worked a lot of overtime
When the bills got just too steep,
The Soldier squared his shoulders and said
And I never passed a cry for help
Though at times I shook with fear,
And sometimes, God forgive me,
I've wept unmanly tears.
I know I don't deserve a place
Among the people here.
They never wanted me around
Except to calm their fears.
If you've a place for me here,
Lord, It needn't be so grand,
I never expected or had too much,
But if you don't, I'll understand."
There was silence all around the throne
Where the saints had often trod
As the Soldier waited quietly,
For the judgment of his God.
"Step forward now, you Soldier,
You've borne your burden well.
Walk peacefully on Heaven's streets,
You've done your time in Hell."
Malaysiakini : On Sept 17, 2008, Abdullah was forced to give up the much coveted
finance portfolio to Najib. Having tasted blood, Najib and Muhyiddin
went to Abdullah again a week later. This time, Abdullah agreed to step
down in April 2009.
Abdullah permitted a very lively media scene.
The unwritten rule then was that as long as the prime minister was not
criticised, all other criticisms backed by facts were acceptable.
Former prime minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi
But by January 2009, it was clear the short-lived media freedom would end soon. Astro decided to shut down some very popular talk shows just before Najib took over the reins.
Najib
was determined to instill fear and reverse the clock to the more
authoritarian time of the past. Abdullahās failure in the 2008 general
election was interpreted by Najib as him not being stern enough towards
the media and not able to strike fear among the noisy opposition and
NGOs like Bersih.
In February 2009, Najib as deputy prime minister
engineered the collapse of the Pakatan Rakyat Perak state government by
inducing several elected representatives to cross over in what was a
precursor to the Sheraton coup.
Among Umno circles and the old
establishment, many felt Abdullah could have prevented Pakatan Rakyat
from taking power in Kedah, Perak, and Selangor in March 2008 by
stitching together Umno-PAS Malay unity governments.
PAS president
Abdul Hadi Awang had no qualms about signing up for such an
arrangement, but not the upright Tok Guru Nik Abdul Aziz Nik Mat.
Nik
Azizās objection to working with Umno at that time effectively delayed
an official Umno-PAS collaboration by a decade, until after the 2018
election.
Najib showed his true colours even before he took power: he is in no
way a democrat, with no respect for media freedom nor the political
mandate given to opposition parties by the people in elections. And,
Najib is more than ready to manipulate PAS to his advantage.
If anything, becoming prime minister only fostered these reprehensible beliefs.
Najibat the apex
Najib
the prime minister had no guiding principles, philosophy, or
conviction. He was a transactional leader whose only purpose was to stay
in office for as long as possible. Several characteristics stood out:
I
think we all know this by now. Najib knew he was not loved, he was
never a charismatic or visionary leader. Former prime minister Dr
Mahathir Mohammad and PKR president Anwar Ibrahim were always more
popular than Najib.
PKR president Anwar Ibrahim (left) and twice former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad
He made up for his lack of popularity by buying support with money, inside Umno and among the population.
Najib
genuinely believed money could buy him support and loyalty. He could
never comprehend why people would fight for justice and dignity.
Second, excessive use of consultants, hollow outcomes
Najib
had been in the system long enough to know he needed to be seen doing
something good for the nation although he clearly had no idea what to do
and he didnāt think the civil service knew either.
Hence Najib
governed through consultants and made policy decisions by way of
PowerPoint presentations. 1Malaysia was a slogan without much substance
proposed by a PR consultant.
With Pemandu, Idris Jala was the
āin-houseā consultant trying to make piecemeal cosmetic changes to
impress voters. A Korean consultant, W Chan Kim, of Blue Ocean Strategy
fame, also landed himself a consultant role with Najib.
They came up with the National Blue Ocean Strategy and one of the first initiatives was putting prisoners in army camps.
Military
leaders were furious that prisons were set up in six army camps, which
was a clear manifestation of the inability of Najib, Idris Jala, and
Chan Kim, to appreciate the real purpose and functions of the armed
forces, and the different roles of the prison department and the
military.
Third, a blatant lack of empathy
Najib
is the ultimate princeling who doesnāt understand the lives of ordinary
people. When he introduced the Goods and Services Tax (GST) as a silver
bullet to cover up plundered national coffers, he failed to understand
the core economic problem the country faced.
Most Malaysians are
not paying income tax because they are in the bottom strata and do not
meet the minimum income threshold. The real challenge was to raise
income, not taxes.
Najib
became a hated figure when GST was implemented in April 2015, which
coincided with the sharp decline of global petrol prices, which prompted
Najib to cut federal budget allocations massively in 2015 and 2016.
And then he encouraged us to take quinoa for good health.
Fourth, imagined impunity
Najib and his wife Rosmah Mansor governed as if they would never fall, that they would always be at the apex of power.
The
blatant disregard for law, rules, and norms were unbelievable.
Committing crimes so brazenly is unforgivable, but whatās crazier is
they never bothered to stay an armās length away from the incriminating
evidence of their financial crimes.
The SRC case which sent Najib
to jail is a case in point. Because Najib felt the need to buy support
from his associates, he needed cash in his bank account, to be issued
with cheques signed under his own name to the Umno and BN warlords.
These
left behind a money trail. Najib and Rosmah made themselves sitting
ducks because they had this distorted sense of legal immunity.
Fifth, no respect, no mercy for his opponents
Najib
used the state apparatus at his disposal to inflict cruelty on his
opponents. The long list of people threatened with their lives or at
least with lawsuits for exposing the 1MDB scandal need not be mentioned
here.
Muhyiddin told me he was tailed by Special Branch officers after he was sacked as deputy prime minister in July 2015.
Najib also jailed his biggest political opponent at that time, Anwar.
When
Najib called Anwar twice by phone on election night in 2018, he must
have regretted the 2015 decision to imprison Anwar as it forced the
opposition to realign and eventually became a force that unseated his
government.
On May 9, 2018, Anwar was still held as a prisoner at a government health facility in Cheras.
Najib
was hoping Anwar would agree to form the government with Umno on the
assumption that Pakatan Harapan would not have enough seats.
Miraculously, Harapan won 113 seats on election night, crossing the 112 line by a hairās breadth.
Political miscalculations
When Najib came into office in 2009, Umno was no longer the hegemon it once was.
In 2008, the opposition broke BNās stranglehold on the two-thirds majority in Parliament.
The
opposition also captured Kedah, Penang, Perak, and Selangor, on top of
Kelantan. That election, the opposition received 49 percent of the
popular votes while BN was at 51 percent.
It should have been a
wake-up call for Najib to reform Umno-BN. But that was not to be. He set
out on a mission to crush the opposition and strengthen the one-party
state.
In 2013, BN won a tawdry victory under Najibās premiership,
where it received 47 percent of the votes and the opposition coalition
Pakatan Rakyat, which consisted of DAP, PKR, and PAS at that time,
received 51 percent.
Pakatan Rakyat leaders in 2013
Gerrymandering allowed BN to hold on to a bigger share of seats with less vote share.
He still refused to budge.
In
Najibās near-decade rule, there was not a single attempt to amend the
Constitution, which requires a two-thirds majority in the lower house of
the Parliament, the Dewan Rakyat.
The reason was simple: Najib could never bring himself to negotiate with the opposition.
In
comparison, constitutional amendments took place thrice after 2018,
once to lower the voting age to 18 and to bring about automatic voter
registration, another to reinstate Sabah and Sarawak as āterritoriesā,
and finally the most recent one was to pave the way for an
anti-party-hopping law.
There were talks between Najibās men and
Anwarās lieutenants between the May 2013 election and National Day on
Aug 31, 2013, to explore collaboration but that did not go very far.
There wasnāt political will on the part of Najib to accommodate the parliamentary opposition.
Instead, Najib pursued a 3-pronged strategy:
First, to remove Anwar from the scene hence removing the alternative prime ministerial candidate.
Second, to lure PAS into Umnoās fold via a Muslim unity platform.
Third, to paint the opposition as DAP and Chinese-dominated, thus unworthy of support from the Malay electorate.
Anwar
was sent to prison on Feb 10, 2015, depriving the opposition of a prime
ministerial candidate. Nik Aziz passed away on Feb 12, 2015 thus
removing the only hurdle for PAS to align with Najib.
In June
2015, PAS split right in the middle. The hardliners who very much
preferred to get closer to Najib ousted the moderates at the party
election, who then exited the party to form Parti Amanah Negara.
I
am made to understand that with increasingly damaging details about
Najibās misconduct in the 1MDB case being leaked, there were efforts in
2015 to persuade Najib to retire gracefully in exchange for protection
and amnesty.
If he ever thought of the slim possibility that he
would one day end up in prison, a well-arranged exit could have
prevented the fall of Umno, BN, and himself.
But Najib and Rosmah
were never able to envisage any political order other than the one in
which they were at the top and untouchable.
Former prime minister Najib Abdul Razak and wife Rosmah Mansor
BN won massively in the Sarawak election on May 7, 2016. Umno also won two concurrent by-elections in Sungai Besar and Kuala Kangsar on June 18, 2016.
Much
as Najib was constantly under pressure by the leaks and reports about
the 1MDB scandal, he was in a very comfortable position.
The
assumption, arising from the twin by-elections, was that Umno and PAS
could go into three-corner fights with Harapan, which was thought to be
advantageous to Umno.
Malays who were unhappy with Najib and Umno would vote for PAS. As long as their votes did not go to Harapan, Umno would win.
Najib
conceived this grand strategy in March 2014 but became complacent and
was caught by surprise by the game-changers introduced by his opponents.
He never expected the opposition to come together, reaching an accommodation
between Mahathir and Anwar on July 14, 2017; and on Jan 7, 2018,
agreeing on Mahathir as the seventh prime minister and Anwar as the
eighth, settling the leadership question in anticipation of the
election.
Najib recently said in hindsight that he considered
dissolving Parliament in August 2017. Actually, I would argue that given
the Mahathir-Anwar accommodation was newly achieved in July 2017, even
an August election might not have saved Najib.
Each of Najibās
gambits, such as deregistering Bersatu just before the dissolution of
Parliament and setting polling day on Wednesday, a work day, caused more uproar among Malaysians towards him and his government.
The grand chessboard was now in the hands of his opponent, Harapan.
During
the campaign period, I was stunned watching a televised speech of Najib
who claimed the huge turnouts at opposition rallies in Malacca and
Putrajaya were because busloads of supporters were sent in from out of
town.
I knew very well that all ceramah-goers came voluntarily without any payment or transport.
Najib
was also highly confident of winning, claiming to āknow the reality on
the groundā and āhave a strong baseā. He and his inner circle were
deluded to think BN would win with a two-thirds majority. He was
completely out of touch and misguided.
I commented at that time,
Najib was like Hitler in his final days, hiding in a bunker, rising only
sparingly and firing a few shots aimlessly.
Fighting for survival post-2018
After
the fall of the BN federal government in GE14, Najib should have known
he would eventually end up in jail. He tried to leave the country but
was stopped.
On June 30, 2018, with Najibās support, Umno elected
Ahmad Zahid Hamidi as its president. Instead of electing a new group of
leaders to renew and rebuild Umno to win power at the next general
election, the party was held ransom by Najib and Zahid.
They knew
they had to destroy the Harapan government if they wanted to stay out of
jail, or better still for them, make a strong comeback.
Umno went
on a scorched earth policy to burn the house down for the Harapan
government. Najib took on a new persona - āMalu Apa Bosskuā - on
Facebook since the Cameron Highlands by-election in January 2019.
Najib in a Bossku shirt
Umno aligned with PAS from October 2018 onwards and together launched an anti-Icerd demonstration on Dec 8, 2018.
Najib
and Zahid engineered attacks after attacks on Harapan. They also played
an instrumental role in the February 2020 Sheraton Move.
Their
aim was to free themselves from their legal cases. Subsequently, not
getting what they wanted from the Muhyiddin government, they went on to bring down Muhyiddin.
And,
since the installation of Ismail Sabri Yaakob as prime minister in
August 2021, Najib and Zahid have been pushing for snap polls and
already caused state-wide elections in Malacca and Johor in November
2021 and March 2022, respectively.
Now that Najib has fallen,
Zahid wonāt hold up for too long. Hypothetically, had Najib apologised
to the nation, removed himself from politics, and begged for some form
of amnesty the moment he was defeated in 2018, the outcomes would have
been very different.
Postscript
In our
recent battles with Najibās Facebook admins over the question of the
littoral combat ships (LCS), I realised Najib has not changed.
Facts
donāt matter to him. He was just putting out false narratives without
even knowing if those postings would boomerang on himself later.
I
believe that one of the reasons why the LCS became such a massive
national sensation was because Najib kept talking about it, at times
with nearly 10 Facebook postings each day.
Najib would listen to
consultants who sound smart but hardly know anything really, such as
Idris Jala or Chan Kim. You now see their new incarnations in Zaid
Ibrahim and Hisyam Teh. They probably helped speed up his entry to
prison.
Najib has never been strategic. He committed too many
follies - political or otherwise - along the way. I know there are still
many who think he will come back one day. I am more than ready to write
his political obituary.
