Pak Lah was right when he said recently: "This election does not involve a personality. Voters are choosing a government (The Star, March 7). He hit the nail on the head also when he proclaimed earlier that his party is with him.

Indeed, Pak Lah is not alone. Behind him is the BN-Umno hegemony which has in the past 22 years manifested itself in an arrogance of power, executive supremacy, political dominance and repression.

'Change' has been the mantra Pak Lah has spun day and night. He may be sincere about implementing the changes he has promised but the system that his predecessor has cultured and bred, and ironically to a great extent on which his (Pak Lah's) political survival depends very much on, will prove much more than he can handle.

The truth, if Pak Lah is still open to it, is that he heads and represents a system, culture and ideology which had spawned so much abuse of power, injustice, corruption and inequality, and that it is so deeply-entrenched that it cannot change from within and by its own accord.

"A coalition in office for nearly 50 years has to make sure the opposition should not be given a chance, that impediments of all kinds be laid before it. That is the mind set. The new regime of Abdullah Ahmad Badawi does not change it. It cannot. There is too much at stake for a new leader to make drastic changes that could rebound on him.

"The BN should have insisted upon a new slate to reflect the changes Pak Lah has in mind, but he has done little of that. The same tired old faces are in attendance. Men and women who should have retired years ago remain candidates. Dropping a candidate is seen as a great sacrifice. In other words, little changes," wrote veteran journalist MGG Pillai recently.

Perhaps Pak Lah shares the same stature as the late Hussein Onn, who was described by Singapore's first statesman Lee Kuan Yew in his memoir, as a 'clean' Malaysian PM. He probably will also share the same and an even worse predicament than Hussein Onn.

According to Kuan Yew: "Sitting at the top of an Umno machine that was based on money politics, Hussein was completely honest. He tried to clean up corruption authorised the prosecution in November 1975 of the menteri besar of Selangor, Harun Idris but Hussein could not widen his purge in face of resistance from other Umno state leaders."

Pak Lah is being confronted with a paradigm so rivetted to the core that even his predecessor Mahathir Mohamad could not undo it. By his very own admission, Mahathir had said during an Umno general assembly that even his tears could not change the culture of corruption that had seeped so deeply into Umno.

The BN-Umno hegemony is an animal or a (rapacious) monster that has been so bred that it has become irreversible and cannot be re-invented through time. It is so powerful that when unleashed it may even result in consequences beyond its own control.

There can be no clearer example of this than the near-lethal assault by former inspector-general of police Rahim Noor on the handcuffed and blind-folded former deputy prime minster Anwar Ibrahim.

The Anwar affair exposed the ruthlessness of the Umno-BN hegemony more than any other recent event in this country. Dr John Hilley, author of Malaysia: Mahathirism, Hegemony and the New Opposition puts it thus: "The wicked persecution, trial and associated witch-hunts surrounding the Anwar affair gave the Malaysian populace some rare glimpses into the repressive capacities of the BN state.

"The ruthless handling of Anwar, complemented by police intimidation, elite corruption and judicial bias, will remain a stain on the political elite's character for a long time to come."

The BN-Umno hegemony is not only about a system that encourages corruption. It is also a culture of political hegemony which is highly detrimental to the healthy growth of democracy. It subverts independence and integrity and public confidence in important democratic institutions such as Parliament, the judiciary, the office of the Attorney-General, the police, the Election Commission, etc.

A vote for Pak Lah is a vote for a hegemony of growing executive dominance which has reduced the political representation of the people, as embodied in Parliament, to nothing more than a rubber stamp, a symbol shorn of substance, stripped of essence, sidelined and side-stepped by the executive.

To stand on the same platform with Pak Lah is to further promote an ideology that ultimately benefits 'dominant interests' - the ruling elite and the unscrupulous cronies of the powers-that-be, and which leaves no place for the small man or woman on the street who has no cash, clout or connections.

To give a vote to the BN is to support a powerful hegemony that ignores minority groups such as the Orang Asli, other indigenous peoples and the Indian rubber estate worker, who have been displaced, deprived, dis-empowered and dislodged from their social environment and natural resource support system, and who have become disillusioned and dysfunctional.

To give Pak Lah a chance is to reinforce a hegemony that employs a gamut of increasingly harsh executive powers to contain, cripple and crush legitimate dissent by the citizens of this country and which resorts to selective prosecution of political opponents for its self-preservation.

To give Pak Lah an overwhelming mandate is to support a hegemony that thrives on the cult of secrecy and which hides the misdeeds of its leaders, and penalises whistleblowers. Giving the BN a stronger mandate does not make things better, in fact things get worse when Malaysians give the BN an overwhelming four-fifths majority.

To rally behind Pak Lah is to condone a hegemony that has used its brute majority to push through many constitutional amendments (40 since Merdeka with most amendments made during the last 22 years), at its whim and fancy - not to strengthen rule of law and basic rights but to erode and erase constitutional checks and balances in order to consolidate and perpetuate the hegemony.

The BN-Umno hegemony is an ideology which promotes what former MP and writer Sim Kwang Yang calls "the politics of de-politisation" - the closing of the Malaysian political mind which began with the assumption that too much politics was bad for development, and that Malaysians cannot handle political liberties without killing each other.

Depolitisation means "shifting the burden of ultimate political decisions away from the people, and concentrating such burden in the hands of the ruling elite. It means giving sole monopoly on political decisio- making to the ruling parties and their fantastic national network of political connections, as far as possible."

"The evolution of our legal and political superstructure in the past three decades, has been geared towards the curbing of civil liberties, especially the right to free speech, assembly and association, in the name of protecting national security and social stability."

It would be apt to recapitulate by using Sim's wisdom on Pak Lah's promise of change: " no one person can clean up a system that has reached the stage of near metastasis in terms of moral and political corruption.

"In its historical development, the idea of democracy has evolved out of a deep-seated and historically tested suspicion against the Rule of Man. The idea is not to give the Great Leader more power, but to curb all exercise of power, through a slow transition to the Rule of Law.

"It would mean a reform from outside the ruling circle, because we cannot expect those powerful people to give up their power willingly. It would entail a radical re-examination of all the institutions of state, to rewrite the rules of the political game, beginning with reform to the election laws and an overhaul of the Election Commission, the guarantee of the independence of the press, the return of non-partisan independence of the police and the army, and the restoration of the independence of the judiciary."

Nothing substantial and real has changed since Pak Lah took over. The pathetic, powerless, prejudiced and pliant performance of the Election Commission and the blatant manner in which the BN has been abusing the use of government machinery during this campaigning period gives further credence to this.

Rais Yatim once wrote in his thesis Freedom under Executive Power in Malaysia: A Study of Executive Supremacy on how the "formidable powers" of the executive have "... thrown off-balance the mechanisms of checks and balances that are so vital to a system that claims to be democratic and guided by the rule of law".

Let us help Pak Lah. Let us halt the BN-Umno hegemony. Let us ensure the necessary checks and balances are brought back into our democratic system. Let us vote the opposition, in spite of its imperfections.