COMMENT Apparently, Zaid Ibrahim is not convinced that difficult problems and decisions actually improve when they are allowed to simmer a little on a backburner.

Today comes news he has quit PKR, barely a year and a half after joining the party in what has become one of Malaysian politics more stormy individual odysseys.  

NONEWealthy lawyer Zaid, on the threshold of his seventh decade in life, moves from impulse to execution in a breathless blur.

“The rich are different from you and me,” observed the novelist F Scott Fitzgerald to his friend Ernest Hemingway.

“Yes, they have more money,” quipped Hemingway, in apparent deprecation of Fitzgerald’s suggestion that destructive neurosis is one of the commonest symptoms of wealth.

Only yesterday stormy petrel Zaid was seen publicly to muse on his predicament as an outcast in PKR and as unwanted in the larger Pakatan family.

Barely had his reflections – if the word can at all be used to dignify his ramblings – time to sink than Zaid’s off on his next breathless course: he announces he has quit PKR.

Not that that was unexpected. Zaid Ibrahim is like cargo come loose in the hold of a freighter: it has to be stacked right or jettisoned.  

Now that he has himself chosen to eject, PKR ought to compose a felt statement of gratitude for what he has done in drawing up last December’s Common Policy Framework for Pakatan Rakyat.

That done, it’s best to maintain a political and dignified silence.

Time to check the fallout

After the pathological display of exhibitionism that was Zaid’s final weeks in PKR, the party, in reaction, should decline to parody the rhythms of reality TV.      

Instead it should move with all deliberate speed to check the fallout from Zaid’s quitting and what it presages for a new party on an increasingly crowded opposition block.

That may entail doing the diametric opposite of what the party’s now presumptive No 2’s inclinations are for PKR Sarawak and Sabah.

Those inclinations have neurosis written on them as much as the narcissism of the individual who has elected to depart the party.

 

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them.