Even as Daniel Tajem covered something like 120 longhouses in the constituency of Bukit Begunan, all of March and April this year, and returned for another grueling sortie in nearly the same localities in the immediate prelude to the May 20 state election in Sarawak, he and his aides knew the last three days before polling would be crucial to the outcome.

That is the time, based on their experience of several past elections, when the money bags come out, the village headmen are propositioned, and the outcome of the poll would hinge on whether the recipients of largess vote with the money or with the way they had responded to the Dayak oppositionist's talks in meet-the-people sessions.

The ruling Barisan Nasional government's disclosure a few days before the vote that a sum of RM5.7 million was to be paid out to 4,760 village chiefs in Sarawak as monthly payments, backdated to March 2006, with the arrears to be paid at the end of May, was the obvious cue to the headmen that he who pays the piper gets to call the tune.

A part of the standard routine of a Tajem ceramah at the longhouses where he campaigned focused on how the villagers should react when propositioned decline, but if they had to take the offer it did not mean they have to deliver the vote.

The latter would entail some chicanery that may be beyond the level of sophistication of the 7,644 voters of Bukit Begunan, 87% of whom are Iban. But unless his listeners were engaged in an elaborate charade, where their emphatic applause for his espousal of the Dayak situation with respect to Native Customary Rights land was so much dissembling, he and his aides had expected that grease would not determine the outcome of the poll, this time at least.

Trailed badly in most wards

They were chastened to discover that when counting commenced on the evening of May 20 that the scarcely-to-be-seen-campaigning BN incumbent, Mong Dagang, who had replaced Tajem as the Parti Bansa Dayak Sarawak (PBDS) candidate for the seat in the 1996 poll while Tajem elected to become Malaysian High Commissioner to New Zealand the previous year, was leading in all the wards.

The only places where Tajem appeared to keep pace with the former bank branch manager were in the wards in Banting, a village only accessible by boat along the Sungai Seterap boarded at the dilapidated hamlet of Lingga. In all the wards accessible by tar-sealed roads, Tajem, who polled 2.076 votes to Mong Dagang's 3,083, trailed badly.

The conclusion was inevitable: where the men with the lucre could dole out the stuff with stealth and with speed, and had the logistics to monitor the disbursements and make sure that it served to deliver the vote, the vote went in contradistinction to the cheering at Tajem's longhouse rallies.

In the immediate prelude to the election Mong Dagang was scarcely visible, in contrast to Tajem's ubiquity, though BN posters and vehicles were everywhere. He must have known that it is the last three days, to paraphrase a common sports adage, that separate the men from the boys