COMMENT After obtaining Prime Minister Najib Razak's acquiescence to stay through another election, Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud has wasted no time in moving to gain what advantage he can from opposition disarray by seeking the dissolution of the Sarawak state assembly tomorrow.

Why would he want to give the opposition, especially newly assertive Snap and presumptuous PKR, more time for a seat-sharing agreement to congeal when the current pretensions of both parties foreclose its possibility?

Even if the two parties arrive at a seat-sharing agreement, there is the spoiler's role, being eyed by a ragbag of candidates, likely hailing from Zaid Ibrahim's Kita and Parti Cinta Malaysia (PCM), to consider.

NONETaib is sufficiently hard-nosed a calculator to know now that he has obtained the lease to fight another election, it's best he try exploiting dissonance in the opposition ranks rather than depend purely on the merits of his own now 30-year track record as CM.

That record has two glowing strands: he has kept the state financially solvent and kept profligate Umno out of Sarawak's politics.

On the debit side, Sarawak languishes on the lower indices of socio-economic progress despite its wealth of petroleum and timber resources.
 
A plutocracy waxes obscenely rich while the vast majority of the people in the longhouses in the interior are mired in the bog of low educational attainment, meager income and dependence on subsistence agriculture.

Those are conditions for the overthrow of insensate, overstaying powers-that-be. But experience of grinding poverty is one thing; political consciousness of the means to change one's fortunes another.

Cultural shackle

The opposition in Sarawak has not had a leader with the visibility, capacity and charisma to galvanise the long-deprived to vote to end their deprivation.

The people there suffer from the Dayak version of ‘Lawan towkay pantang', which for long has been the Malay shibboleth that helped reconcile the deprived on the peninsula to their lot.

But even that cultural shackle ran out of its force to hypnotise the gullible into submission, as happened at the last general in March 2008.     

Since then, pundits have tried to infer as to when Sarawak's Dayaks, the majority community, would want to emulate the stirrings from slumber that their counterparts among the Malay and Indian have-nots on the peninsula assayed at the 12th general election.

But what's potent and regenerative on one side of the South China Sea may not be on the other.

What's sure is that the results of Sarawak's 10th state election, which is almost certain to be held by the middle of next month, will be crucial to Najib's calculations of when to hold the country's 13 general election.

An emphatic victory for the Taib-led BN would mean an extension, however brief, on political life for the CM.

However, losses higher than the eight seats BN suffered at the last state polls in May 2006 would almost certainly bring closure to Taib's already overly long tenure.

It would also issue in more amperage poured into the batteries of the peninsula opposition, seen as having run down from internal dissensions, Anwar Ibrahim's interminable sodomy battles, and public fatigue over reformasi's magic in the face of the spurious seductions of Najib's half-cocked reforms.

 

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. It is the ideal profession for a temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent.