By: JOE FERNANDEZ
GOODBYE….If it’s going to be a long goodbye, dragging on to mid-term, Taib's unlikely to be taken seriously.
THE imminent Sarawak state elections are being overshadowed by feverish speculation on the political future of Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud. The kleptocrat’s eyes told it all as he faced a horde of reporters, sensing a kill, after he met visiting Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak at Kuching Airport on Friday. He tried to smile for the cameras but his eyes told a different story.
Taib, it is said, would set a quit date well before nomination day. This must be the ‘secret weapon’ that Sarawak United People’s Party (SUPP) President, George Chan mentioned recently. The speculation is that Taib will either quit before the election seen as a ridiculous idea or step down not long after the elections.
How soon, if after the elections, is anybody’s guess. If it’s going to be a long goodbye, dragging on to mid-term, he’s unlikely to be taken seriously.
Much will hinge on whether the army of hangers-on around Taib, his notorious seven bomohs included, will once again get their way with the man to delay the inevitable. The number of self-serving people gravitating around Taib over the last 30 years has grown by leaps and funds as the gravy train had more to dispense to continue to keep him in power.
If Taib is going to quit immediately after the state election, the question which will be asked is why he can’t quit now and be done with it once-and-for-all.
If he quits before the state polls, it would mean yet another round of brickbats for waiting until the very last minute, “What took him so long?” before deciding to throw in the towel.
Ostensibly, all this quit talk is to ensure that the largely-Chinese urban electorate doesn’t desert Supp, a key component in the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN). The desertion of the urban electorate is expected to spill over into the parliamentary seats in the state.
This would further slash the BN’s slender lead in Parliament and threaten its already shaky hold on Putrajaya. This is the nightmare House of Cards scenario.
‘Saving Supp’ is seen as a euphemism, if not the proverbial fig-leaf, to mask the obvious public distress over the numerous exposes on his fabulous personal wealth.
The Chinese business community attributes the extent of corruption under Taib to his penchant for having a finger in every slice of the economic pie in Sarawak. This is considered a gross distortion of the economy and one which the Chinese community in particular would no longer continue to tolerate.
Saving Supp
The Dayaks, the majority community, have been particularly at the receiving end of the stick. The state government has seized thousands of hectares of their native customary rights (NCR) land for Taib, his family, relatives, friends and cronies.
Some scale of the seizures can be seen from the fact that Mahmud Abu Bekir Taib, one of his son’s, has thousands of hectares of land in Sarawak. Mahmud’s estranged wife, Shahnaz Majid, is seeking half of the land bank, other assets of the billionaire and RM 400 million, according to documents filed last month at the Syariah Court in Kuala Lumpur.
Yet, nepotism and corruption doesn’t seem to figure as much as ‘saving Supp’ in Taib’s reportedly calculated move to resign ‘before it’s too late’.
There have been more than calls for Taib to call it a day after three controversial decades in power.
The pressure has intensified in recent weeks including, it is said, from Najib himself. Taib has reportedly been taking shelter of late behind Rosmah, Najib’s wife.
The writing was on the wall immediately after the BN lost nine state seats at the last outing in 2006.
This was followed by Supp’s monumental loss of the Sibu parliamentary seat late last year. It was the last straw for Supp leaders who had earlier advised Taib, to his utter humiliation, to virtually hide himself away from the people during the campaign.
To add insult to injury, Taib and Chan are related by marriage, the latter’s only child and daughter married to a son of the former. Chan is also a Deputy Chief Minister.
Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin, who led the BN campaign in Sibu, was doing quite well until Najib turned up at the last minute with a bizarre plea. He shocked Sibuans by appearing to bribe them outright with their own money: “I want to make a deal with you tonight. You do something for me vote BN and I will do something for you.”
He then went on to offer a measly RM5 million in outright government grants for the Chinese community but after the election result was in. The RM5 million contrasted poorly with the RM 75 million that the BN had poured earlier into Hulu Selangor, another by-election, before D-day.
Between 2006 and Sibu, Supp had already been beating the drums of war and blaming Taib for the party’s steady downward slide. The young Turks, if they had their way, would like to pull the party out immediately from the BN to avert annihilation at the ballot box.
The old guards, George Chan & Co, who have the party in a vice-like grip, would have none of it.
The moderates made a hasty trip to Putrajaya late last year with a grim message for Najib: “Taib will have to go and the sooner the better.”
This is the second time that Supp has taken the lead in dethroning a sitting Chief Minister. In late 1980, then Supp secretary-general Stephen Yong led a party delegation to Sri Perdana and advised Prime Minister Hussein Onn: “Remove Abdul Rahman Ya’kub as Sarawak Chief Minister or Supp will quit the BN”.
Rahman, Taib’s immediate predecessor and maternal uncle, was forced out before Hussein left in early 1981 but not before Taib was accepted as his successor and he was made Governor.
Who’s next
In any case, Taib’s departure alone won’t be enough to satisfy the people in Sarawak in general, the urban electorate in particular.
Questions will be raised if George Chan and the other old guards continue to rule Supp and offer themselves again to the discerning electorate.
The party will splinter even before the polls in an all-out internal bloodbath pitting the moderates and the young Turks against the old guards if George Chan & Co don’t take themselves out of the political equation in Sarawak.
Likewise, Taib will have to take along Alfred Jabu Anak Numpang, another Deputy Chief Minister, into political oblivion.
Jabu is also a deputy president representing the Dayak-based Pesaka wing in Taib’s Pesaka Bumiputera Bersatu (PBB).
Taib would like to see Jabu as a stop-gap chief minister until Norah Abdul Rahman, his cousin and Rahman’s daughter, can take over from him. Norah is Tanjung Manis MP.
Najib, it is said, has other ideas and is plugging for Abang Johari Abang Openg, also a PBB deputy president and Deputy Chief Minister.
Unlike Taib who is a Melanau Dayak, Johari is a Malay. He may not be that acceptable to the Dayak community who will see him as further evidence of continuing proxy rule by Putrajaya and driven by its ketuanan Melayu (Malay supremacy and dominance) mindset.
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