There is a look of uncertainty surrounding Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi (Pak Lah) these days. His 9th Malaysian Plan (9MP) has not taken off, with many projects still in the planning stage despite a slew of announcements since March.

His son-in-law and Umno Youth deputy president Khairy Jamaluddin led a demonstration objecting strongly to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's visit to Kuala Lumpur recently.

This offered the twisted logic that, "From the people of Malaysia, we do not welcome Rice here. You may be invited by the government, but we do not welcome Rice here".

Pak Lah had to publicly repudiate Khairy's call for a boycott of British and US goods. Is governing Malaysia reduced to renouncing announcements by his only son-in law?

When Pak Lah became prime minister in 2003, he promoted himself as an honest and decent man who cared about the ordinary bloke. Starting off as a liberal wanting a more open and democratic government, he assured Malaysians he wanted them to tell him the truth. He launched a crusade to clean up corruption and check abuse of power with the formation of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Management and Operations of the Police.

He cloaked himself with humility in asking Malaysians to work with him and not for him. There was even talk of a Kuala Lumpur Spring ushered by Pak Lah. So impressed were Malaysians that they gave him the largest mandate in electoral history, enabling Barisan Nasional (BN) to win 91 percent of the parliamentary seats.

Three years later, instead of enjoying the bountiful harvest of the KL Spring, Malaysians are disenchanted by his policies and disillusioned by his empty rhetoric. The recommendations of the Royal Commission have only gathered dust; the liberal atmosphere has ended abruptly with dire warnings prohibiting discussions on the rights of non-bumis and non-Muslims in respect to the 9MP and Islamic state; newspapers have been closed down; and threats of stern action levelled against blogs and Internet websites.

Pak Lah even took issue with the Article 11 coalition for organising discussions and fora defending the rights of non-Muslims and questioning BN's unilateral declaration that Malaysia is an Islamic state.

He warned that no more fora should be held even though Muslim academics at these events had reminded the government that the Supreme Court in the Che Omar Che Soh case in 1988 had declared that the Federal Constitution is secular and does not make Malaysia an Islamic state. In that judgment, Chief Justice Salleh Abas ruled that the Syariah law was not the basic law of the land and that the constitution was the supreme law. Unless there is a constitutional amendment, Malaysia is not and never was an Islamic state.

Inaction all round

Clearly, Pak Lah is no longer interested in hearing the truth. No wonder Malaysians seem to believe in rumours such as Khairy taking glamorous actress Maya Karin as his second wife. (Khairy and Maya have separately denied this.)

The latest police action against malaysiakini for reporting the 'pepper spray attack' against former premier Dr Mahathir Mohamad - despite an apology being offered - show the determination to permit only the official line.

Yet, RTM and TV3 were allowed to get off scot-free with a mere apology when they committed the graver offence of inadvertently revealing caricatures depicting the image of Prophet Muhammed.

The anti-corruption campaign has come to a halt, epitomised by inaction against Jasin MP Mohamad Said for telling the Malacca Customs Department to "close one eye" over a consignment of timber handled by his company.

The crime rate has gone from bad to worse when sections of the police force are more interested in merrily 'squeezing' money out of gamblers even though they want to plead guilty, or harassing pub patrons with a suspicious 'positive' urine test for drugs when they are clean, by using threats of remand of several days in a lock-up.

What makes Abdullah a PM on the run is not that the public disenchantment has spread even to his own party but his failure to impose himself upon dissidents who want more crony capitalism, racial preferential polices, extremist Islamisation and greater political restrictions.

The PM's main challenge is supposed to be the visible challenge from his predecessor who appointed him - Mahathir has called him corrupt and even unpatriotic for giving in to Singapore (by retracting the decision to build the half-bridge).

Weakened personality

The greater challenge for Pak Lah however is his inability to continue his reform agenda. Except for the political sloganeering of creating the 'Towering Malaysian' and Islam Hadhari, there have been no substantive achievements. There is nothing distinctively Pak Lah in government policy and his administration is distinguished more by the sense of indecision and drift.

Mahathir has levelled the harshest attacks by labeling himself as a prime minister of Malaysia, unlike Pah Lah who is the 'PM of his own family'. Pak Lah's inability to counter Mahathir's allegations or to dispel growing perceptions that his immediate family or coterie of advisors have unduly benefited from government largesse are therefore all the more painful.

Mahathir unplugged has immeasurably weakened Pak Lah's political strength and sapped his integrity and hence diminished his personal authority and moral credibility to govern.

Pak Lah should take heed of the experience of the great Chinese reformist Deng Xiao Peng. Deng was on the run all the time, both from those who supported his reforms to open up China as well as those who opposed them. When faced by the challenge from those impatient with the pace of reforms, Deng cracked down hard on students seeking democracy in the infamous June 4, 1989 incident. Inevitably greater repression followed.

But Deng set the reform spirit flowing again with his famous tour of the southern Chinese provinces in 1992, pushing for greater opening up of China. His final tour de force before his death stamped economic liberalisation as the raison d'etre for China's future and placed him among the pantheon of Chinese heroes.

Pak Lah appears to have followed Deng in running one way by cracking down hard on those asking for greater liberalisations and freedoms, following the Mahathir challenge. But he has not run in the opposite direction as Deng did.

Where is his promise of creating an independent entrepreneur class not reliant on government patronage, establishing a merit-based educational policy, nurturing a culture of excellence in human capital formation or the civil service, forging transparency and accountability in government procurement and cultivating increased competitiveness in industry?

Pak Lah may not admit that, with the challenge from Mahathir, political expediency requires him to run backwards. The question then would be when or will he ever run forward?

Pak Lah has up to two more years to answer that. Otherwise, voters who feel cheated by his unfulfilled promises would have a duty to give him their answer.

LIM GUAN ENG is secretary-general of opposition party DAP.