It must be a matter of some irony that the last time Abdul Taib Mahmud felt pressured to quit, one half of the pair from the peninsula that had piled it on is now under duress himself.

It is unlikely that the Sarawak chief minister, who completes 32 years in office next month, will choose to meditate on the vicissitudes of fate when he addresses two important political meetings in Kuching this weekend, though he is in what can be regarded as a reversal of predicaments vis-a-vis Prime Minister Najib Razak.

Taib is shaping up to indicate when he will bow out which is different to Najib's situation where the latter is warding off being shown the door.      

Almost three years ago the PM, with deputy Muhyiddin Yassin in tow, descended on the Sarawak capital to impress upon Taib, then completing his third decade as CM, the need for him to quit before upcoming polls in the state.

Taib was regarded as a liability to the state BN heading into the election just as Najib is now viewed by sections in Umno as certain to lose BN the next general election four years down the road.  

In March 2011 when the Umno top two met up with Taib in Kuching, Najib was finishing his second year as the national CEO, still flush in his newfangled premiership.

Taib, in contrast, was besieged with corruption allegations and as having grossly overstayed his welcome as CM.

It was time for Taib to go. The PM and deputy had come to town on a Saturday morning for a friendly chat with Taib.

They had hoped to nudge the man in the direction of the exits coupled with a suggestion as to who ought to be his replacement.

A gingerly change of pace, one would have thought, from what would have been a hectic day had the Umno top pair been on the peninsula where the political weekend is usually given over to shoring up the home base or reinforcing the national agenda.   

Not quite relishing the task of alone convincing Taib to go, the PM had required the shoring up presence of his deputy, renowned then as author of a subversive tone of public remonstrance that had made short shrift of Abdullah Ahmad Badawi's forlorn attempt to stave off party pressure to quit as prime minister which happened two years prior to the Najib-Muhyiddin mission of similar intent to Kuching.  

One-half of BN's fixed deposit

If Najib felt that the DPM's presence would make easy work of inducing Taib to retire, what with a state election imminent and the need for a new-broom PM to make a clean breast of things in Sarawak as well as in the rest of the country, he was unpleasantly surprised.

Already in his mid-70s, Taib fended off the Umno duo's overtures, arguing the case for his staying on with a vigour that belied his years.

All Najib and Muhyiddin would receive for their pains was agreement that the BN slate of candidates, studded with Taib's relatives, would be shorn of them, coupled with an assurance that a time frame would be offered for the CM's withdrawal from an arena he presided over with gravity-defying longevity.

A fortnight after the visit, the Sarawak state assembly was dissolved. Taib then hinted he would retire two or three years into the new term he was seeking.

He duly got the new term and although his party, PBB, make a clean sweep of the 34 seats it had contested, their Chinese-based ally SUPP suffered stinging losses to the DAP.

But this was not enough to heighten the pressure on Taib to leave sooner than he had himself suggested, as two years later he lodged PBB's 14 parliamentary seats safely in the overall tally of federal BN's, solidifying the now conventional wisdom that Sarawak was one-half of BN's Borneo fixed deposit.       

Now that that time frame on Taib's withdrawal has just about run out, the news that two political meetings in Kuching this weekend - Saturday's of  PBB, and Sunday's of Sarawak BN - has a triggered a flurry of speculation that he is about to make an announcement about his future.

Most of the speculation expects he would announce a date for his retirement or even of his relinquishment of his post, with a possible elevation to the governorship of the state, a role its current occupant vacates on Feb 28.

But a survey of the candidates being bandied about as probables for Taib's post suggests that each is short on one or the other of the three qualities deemed as necessary in the role.

One is command and control ability over what can sometimes be a fractious state BN, bearing in mind the now critical factor that Sarawak is a vital part of federal BN's fixed deposit.

The other requisite is an adequately competent performance either as state minister and/or federal minister. And the third requirement is wide acceptability by the ethnic mélange that is Sarawak - no fewer than 26 ethnicities make up the mosaic.

Keeping Umno out of S’wak

None of the five probables being touted - Adenan Satem, Alfred Jabu, Abang Johari Openg, Awang Tengah Hassan, and Effendi Nawawi - has all what it takes.

Adenan comes up the least short but the 69-year-old has had a pacemaker installed.

Jabu is unacceptable to the majority Dayak community as he is seen as a toady and Awang Tengah is short on popularity, besides being disapproved of by Putrajaya who don't want any replacement to attract the same allegations of corruption that Taib does.

Effendi Nawawi's only qualification is that he is Melanau, the community that has supplied two of Sarawak's four CMs since its merger with Malaya in 1963.

This leaves Abang Johari ( left ) who is Putrajaya's favourite but he is considered pretty short on ability. Johari's chief shortcoming would be the perception that he would allow Umno to take root in the state.                    

In the eyes of Sarawakians, Taib's paramount achievement is in keeping Umno out of the state. He has been cagey in the way he has worked to prevent that.

Sarawakians look to Sabah and shake their heads at what has happened to that state after Umno's entry, in the early 1990s, into the politics of that place.

The majority Dayak community in Sarawak feels that despite their lack of progress compared to the Muslim bumiputeras of the state, they are still better off than their ethnic cousins in Sabah, the Kadazan-Dusun-Muruts, once the majority in their state who from the mid-1990s on - after an influx of illegals from surrounding countries - suffered a demographic downgrade, with adverse ramifications to their economic and social standing.

Keeping Umno out and maintaining state government equanimity about Christian Dayaks' freedom to use the term ‘Allah’ for God in Indonesian and Iban language bibles have placed Taib in a good light vis-à-vis Putrajaya's squeamishness over the issue of Christians' use of the same term on the peninsula.

On these two issues, Taib, who will be 78 in May, is seen by the average Sarawakian as wise and steady and, more importantly, able to maintain the status quo.

It is no secret that Umno is angling for entry into Sarawak's politics, if only to ensure the state endures as federal BN's fixed deposit.

For that reason, the state BN is likely on Sunday to endorse a concept where Taib may propose a caretaker chief minister-ship with him in a tutelary role as prelude to his eventual exit from office.

Thus while shaping to go he gets to monitor what goes on under his attenuated watch, an unusual device for the end of an extraordinary career.

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