PKR on charm offensive aimed at civil servants

PKR is battling a perception problem these days. Its de facto leader Anwar Ibrahim is beset with legal woes and lately there's been the sex video allegations.

Defecting lawmakers and allegations of discrepancies in their last party polls also gave the party the kind of headlines and image it really could do without.

On top of that, it is facing an uphill battle to win a larger share of the Malay votes as there are those who argue that the party is not ‘Malay enough'.

The reality is, with Malays making up 65 percent of the country's population, PKR has now identified the civil service as the frontline to capturing Malay hearts.

"The typical Malay mentality is that you have made it if you landed a government job," said party communications director Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad (left). 

"It's not about being an entrepreneur or working in the private sector. So it all has to start with the civil service."

At a low-key dialogue with about 50 young professionals in a hotel in Subang Jaya on Friday, the participants had asked him about the party's strategies in winning back the seemingly dwindling support from the community.

To do that, an early step is to put a halt to the hostility against civil servants. This, he felt, is of primary importance.

He said that the Pakatan state governments could adopt a model of amnesty for civil servants, forgiving and forgetting small mistakes before moving on.

No witch hunt

"We don't want to encourage a witch hunt (between party leaders) and civil servants. It is counter productive, and at the end of the day, it makes us alienate them even more," he said.

However, Lembah Pantai MP and PKR vice-president Nurul Izzah Anwar (right) who was also present at the dialogue, had earlier had fingered civil servants as being hostile to Pakatan Rakyat in the first place.

Responding to another question, she said that the issue of having civil servants leaking minutes of meetings is still very real.

The animosity between Pakatan state governments and civil servants has been well-documented.

While former Perak MB Mohammad Nizar Jamaluddin had repeatedly accused his state secretary of having a hand in the 'takeover' of his government by the BN in 2009, the Khalid administration in Selangor saw themselves edged out when the federal government appointed someone not in their favour as the state's top civil servant.

Apart from the state secretaries, it also understood that the state governments face difficulties with their state legal advisors from time to time.