Will Muhyiddin hit the Musa trail?

Terence NettoPublished: Jul 28, 2015 11:00 AM | Updated: Jul 28, 2015 2:30 PM

COMMENT Is Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin’s present predicament the same as his predecessor, Musa Hitam’s, of nearly three decades ago?

Sabah state speaker Salleh Said Keruak has suggested that Muhyiddin takes the route Musa assayed in February 1986 when the then deputy prime minister quit the cabinet of then-prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad, citing irreconcilable differences.

Salleh’s advice comes in the wake of Muhyiddin’s publicly-aired lament of Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak’s handling of the 1MBD issue at the Cheras Umno division meeting that he closed on Sunday night.

This was the DPM’s first sustained critique of the whole issue, with earlier ones having been exhibitions of sporadic doubt than sustained stricture.

The critical comments from Muhyiddin echo those made since the beginning of this year by the affair’s most trenchant critic, Mahathir.

The former PM has argued that Najib’s continued stay in office, amid the miasma of unexplained debt and seemingly grand larceny in the 1MDB affair, imperilled BN’s chances of victory in the next general election (GE14).

At the Cheras Umno meeting, Muhyiddin aired not only the same opinion but went further in the way of dissent with his boss on the 1MDB issue.

He has crossed a Rubicon but will resignation aid his upward mobility or will he, like Musa, suffer relegation to the periphery of Umno politics from having lost a battle of ideals, minds and wills with the party chieftain?

Salleh’s suggestion that Muhyiddin hit the Musa ( photo ) trail is not without pertinence: the Umno deputy president is at the point vis-a-vis the 1MDB imbroglio where Musa was 29 nine years ago when faced with incipient signs of Mahathir’s authoritarianism.

But herein lies the rub.

Musa at that point in time, which was about five years into the Mahathir administration, was seen as a liberal, wanting more openness; benign towards the dissidence of the new PBS government of Pairin Kitingan in Sabah; sceptical of the Islamisation program that was launched with Anwar Ibrahim’s induction in 1982 into Umno; and leery of the growing nexus between big business and government encouraged by Mahathir.

By contrast, Muhyiddin at this stage of his career, is quite firmly established as a Malay right winger, one not known to harbour liberal ideals especially if these endanger the special position of the Malays, and not savvy like Musa in subsuming a vaunted Malay identity under a Malaysian one.

A departure from Muhyiddin’s norm

This makes Muhyiddin’s quest for openness on the 1MDB issue a departure from his norm; he cannot pretend it is an extension of proclivities latent in him.

For the record, Muhyiddin had supported Musa in the latter’s dissidence against Mahathir but later changed tack and backed Mahathir after the then PM made him menteri besar of Johor in 1986.

In that, he was what has become an Umno archetype - studied placemen and time servers, adept at shifting allegiances to suit career advancement prospects or economic interests.

This makes Salleh’s prodding Muhyiddin to resign a la Musa an entrapment that would divest the man of the powers of patronage the office of DPM offer, while easing Najib’s hand at promoting Zahid Hamidi to the vacant position.

It would be better for Muhyiddin to deploy insurgency from within in preference to dissidence from without as this course would allow him to wield what powers of patronage he can retain as DPM, an important distinction to Umno's placemen and time servers.

It has not been done before but the post of Umno deputy president which comes with the DPM entitlement has long being an awkward one: the holder must run in the bossman’s slipstream while subtly working out his own agenda.

It has never been accomplished with any degree of success which is why the position has had a high casualty rate, with Musa Hitam, Ghafar Baba ( photo ), and Anwar Ibrahim all having come a cropper.

Only Abdullah Badawi managed to survive his stint, and that must have been because of the brevity of his tenure (January 1999 to October 2003) and the extent of the preceding casualty rate; one more casualty and the people would have dubbed bossman Mahathir the ‘terminator’ that Musa has come, more in jest than earnestness, to describe him.

In the event, even Abdullah’s survival as DPM proved Pyrrhic upon his ascension to higher office; a PM, Mahathir, citing what could only be regarded as deferred insubordination, had him cashiered in quick time.

This sounds like a jeremiad on the impossibility of the deputy president-of Umno-cum-deputy prime minister’s post in Malaysia’s politics.

It is not; simply, it is a lament on the centralisation of power in the Umno president-cum-PM’s hands which is pure folly as its formulator, Mahathir, now knows.

It may be too late for Umno’s physician to remedy what he has wrought.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others.