Will Najib succeed where others have failed?

By Sim Kwang Yang

Najib Razak in the concluded annual general meeting last year to bring renewal and reform to their 60-year-old political party.

While die-hard supporters of the Pakatan Rakyat coalition will look at this latest move by Najib as just another spin, I am more circumspective.

I have to grudgingly grant this to the prime minister: he has got guts and vision. For him to make such a call, he has to break out of the cocoon of denial that has plagued so many other component parties of the Barisan Nasional. He realises the weaknesses of Umno, and the party image of being self-serving, arrogant, and out of touch with the people.

He has done where MCA, MIC and Gerakan have failed: mobilise an entire party towards re-engineering, rebranding, and rejuvenating the identity and direction of Umno. Apparently, he has come to the conclusion, and rightly so, that unless something is done radically to change Umno, they will lose their 60-year dominance in Malaysian politics.

Meanwhile, Umno delegates have also passed 41 amendments to their party constitution to remove the quota system for party election and make it easier for members to stand as candidates in these elections.

The voting base has also been expanded from mere 2,510 delegates to 146,500 members, theoretically to curtail money politics and vote-buying in party elections.

He has also managed to make his ’1Malaysia’ the slogan for Umno members as he exhorted leaders and members to be more inclusive and work for all Malaysians, rather than harping on the old Umno Malay nationalist rhetoric.

The Umno Youth chief Khairy Jamaluddin even switched his concern from the Malay dominance of old to ‘Malay leadership’. The keris has been banished to the storeroom this year.

The general assembly was visibly moved by this clarion call by their president for change and rebirth; the mood inside and outside the meeting hall was certainly celebratory. Many of them talked as if the transformation has been successfully completed.

Beware the forces of reaction

Assuming that this call by Najib is not just a spin but a concrete and substantive new direction packed with actual programmes to be implemented in stages within the party from top to bottom in the months and years ahead, the chasm between declared intention and actualisation of purpose is filled with perils.

In any large organisation, any move to bring radical change is bound to meet with stiff resistence from a majority of the members. Most people are conservative and fear any kind of change. They will tell you that “if it ain’t broke, why fix it?” Lethargy and inertia seem to be the defining characteristics of long-established human organisations.

In Malaysia, 10 years after the slogan of ‘reformasi’ broke out on the streets of Kuala Lumpur, the Pakatan Rakyat is still struggling with winning the hearts and minds of Malaysians in their quest for change. It could be another decade before real change can materialise in our country.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Umno was a political movement led and moved by Malay grassroot leaders – the school teachers, civil servants, journalists, intellectuals, farmers and fishermen. The spirit of voluntarism was very much alive, and Umno leaders and members were prepared to make great personal sacrifices for their cause.

Today, the top Umno leadership are all drawn from the corporate and public sector, the real elite that sits at the top of the Malay political food chain in Malaysia. They seek to secure support from the bottom through a system of patronage, and I seriously doubt the spirit of volunteerism is still alive in Umno.

To shout about change and reform is fine, but real change will inevitably affect the vested personal interest of the leaders at various levels. With political participation invariably so tied up with furtherance of vested interest, those calling for change must be prepared to confront resistence and sabotage.

Give him the benefit of doubt but…

In fact, in the launching of a movement to reform and change, political organisations can often trigger off a power struggle. An obvious case is the Cultural Revolution which plunged the Chinese Communist Party into 10 years of repression and intense power grab by the Gang of Four.

In recent decades, Umno has been corroded from within by money politics of various forms. It has become a tradition. Without some form of monetary or material incentive, members will simply not move. Even if the voting base for party election has been expanded from 2,510 delegates to 146,500 members, there will be innovative people who can devise new ways of vote-buying.

Vote-buying and corruption in Umno has its roots in the society at large. Umno leaders know that once they become party leaders at the highest levels, they have access to ministerial positions, there to get rich overnight in the public sector. Unless corruption is cleaned up in public life, money politics will continue to thrive and fester within the party.

In a national campaign for votes, the candidates during any party election will have to rely on the national press, especially the Umno-controlled newspapers and TV stations. The corrupt practices will then extend to members of the media.

Then again, in all those states and divisions, there will always be those factions whose rivalries may have existed for decades. They will continue to use this new notion of reform to sabotage one another.

Then there is the contradiction in Umno ideology. The party that has thrived for 60 years to defend the dominant position of the Malays in Malaysia, is not going to think of working for all Malaysians just because the party president says so. You simply cannot change the ideological orientation of an established political party like that overnight.

Though I am prepared to give Najib the benefit of the doubt, and grant him the earnest to reform the party from within, I just do not see how he can ever succeed. To reform Umno is a task that even Hercules will baulk at.

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