More on Daim On Anwar

March 28, 2011

Kuantan, Pahang

Daim on Anwar: Unravelling Fact from Fiction

by Terence Netto@www.malaysiakini.com

How to disentangle fact from fiction, how to extract the kernel of truth from the husk of musings Daim Zainuddin aired yesterday in the Utusan Malaysia, a paper that has made it its mission to destroy the main subject of the interview: Anwar Ibrahim?

First, that the usually taciturn Daim has spoken at all is in itself remarkable because of a preference for the shadowy corners of public life where he is able to defy categorisation.

Daim is a lawyer who disdains legal work, a businessman whose holdings are unlisted because of clever use of proxies, an economist who learned about the dismal science from another lawyer-cum-economist (James Puthucheary), and a political soothsayer who has been spot-on he predicted, before the last general election that the BN would do badly in Kedah and Selangor, and was proven right.

Because of the strong nexus between business and politics forged in the last three decades of the countrys economic progress, Daim was able to inhabit the shadowy corners of politics where self-serving ambition can be hidden behind official policy.

Precisely because so many politicians have labels around them, this man of no labels is intriguing: he is respected and despised in equal measure.

His assessment of Anwar Ibrahim is vented at a time when the Sodomy II case against the opposition leader is wobbling badly and a sex video that purports to show him in a compromising situation with a sex worker is badly boomeranging on UMNO.

It would seem that try their damndest as they are wont, UMNO cannot slay the beast. So, in the prelude to a state poll in Sarawak, Daim is called upon by forces reduced to desperation by the seeming failure of their interdictory ardours, to weigh in for a late rescue of a fading cause: the resuscitation of BN by denigration of its principal tormentor, Anwar Ibrahim.

More political theater

In sum, what is Daim saying about Anwar? That Anwars fall in UMNO was occasioned by his own blemishes rather than through a conspiracy; that he is a political chameleon who will sacrifice principle for popularity any day; that he came up in Umno because of Dr Mahathir Mohameds patronage and the partys machinery; that he is an incompetent administrator whose party (PKR) is his stool pigeon and which is part of a coalition (Pakatan! Rakyat< /a>) that is a marriage of threadbare convenience; and that the Anwar-led Pakatan have not the vision nor the skill to match BNs proven track record of bringing progress to the Malaysian polity: and that enough of the electorate know of Anwars ineptitude to disbelieve that he could reform Malaysian politics and bring about development and progress.

The criticisms have to be mulled in all their scatter-shot detail to figure out if Daim has made a plausible case for the forestalling of the Anwar Ibrahim from the office of prime minister of Malaysia?

No doubt, in the next few days the public will be treated to expostulations and replies by the affected parties. These will get them no closer to the actual picture.

All the public will be witness to is another round of the cut-and-thrust of political debate, political theater that will only freeze each side in the positions they have already dug into.

A gaping void in body politic

But if you shed every jot of malice and tittle of triviality from the salvos each side fires at the other, you will arrive at a gaping void: that there is no reliable way you could come to an assessment of the truth of what each side says because of dereliction of the duty of the media to inform with fact and enlighten with insight over the years.

This was a dereliction in which UMNO was complicit, particularly in the period when it was led by the man, Mahathir, whom Daim served.

If and when Anwar becomes PM, he does rectify this gaping hole in the body politic, he will have more than compensated for the faults Daim plausibly attributes to him: his lack of administrative panache and his successful! fight f or the reversion of English-use as part of the medium of instruction in schools.

Of course, Anwar as PM means that Daims thus far remarkable occupancy of the murkier corners of Malaysian politics where reality slides around idealism would no longer be tenable. That alone is reason enough to vet what he now says about Anwar for the self-protective anxiety the hypothesis of Anwar as PM is apt to stir in him.