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Umno’s longevity owes much to loyalty — but at what cost?

Speaking at a dinner to mark the 70th anniversary of the United Malays National Organisation (Umno) last week, party president Najib Razak emphasised the loyalty and unity of members as key ingredients of the resilience of Malaysia’s ruling party.

File photo of Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak during a speech at UMNO's anniversary celebration in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on May 11, 2015. Photo: AP

File photo of Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak during a speech at UMNO's anniversary celebration in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on May 11, 2015. Photo: AP

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Speaking at a dinner to mark the 70th anniversary of the United Malays National Organisation (Umno) last week, party president Najib Razak emphasised the loyalty and unity of members as key ingredients of the resilience of Malaysia’s ruling party.

He had made the same point during the Umno general assembly late last year, amid a leadership crisis following his sacking of Muhyiddin Yassin as Deputy Prime Minister.

By all measures, the party deserves an applause for all its hard work in perpetuating its longevity. However, is loyalty enough to sustain it in the long-term?

To understand the long tenure of Umno, it is critical to briefly review how the party has evolved since its inception. Broadly, one can argue that Umno has gone through three critical phases.

The first was when Umno emerged as a social movement in 1946 against the Malayan Union. When the Malayan Union was replaced by the Federation of Malaya, Umno began to function as a political party. It is critical to emphasise that, despite its communal shade, Umno was a nationalistic movement in its early days.

The second phase was when the party began to seek wider political influence in the lead-up to independence in 1957. After independence, Umno and its coalition partners practised consociational democracy, where each ethnic group is represented in the coalition and communal rights are safely guarded. This form of power sharing proved to be a successful formula.

But the smooth-sailing political journey of Umno was interrupted by the harrowing 1969 racial riots which led to the declaration of a State of Emergency. Between 1969 and 1971, Malaysia was governed by a National Operations Council (NOC), led by seven committee members.

The lack of checks and balances within the NOC inadvertently allowed leaders from Umno to play a more assertive role in promulgating policies that favoured Umno’s durability.

While far from publicly advocating for the primacy of the Malay agenda, there were clearly concerted efforts from NOC to promote the interests of the Malay population.

There is no doubt that there was an urgent need to uplift the socioeconomic conditions of the Malays, but ruling members of NOC were also aware that the survival of Umno was dependent on the support of the Malays, hence the introduction of the New Economic Policy — an affirmative-action policy.

As the second phase of Umno paved the way for the prominence of Malay rights, it was in the third phase of Umno that we see the blatant advocacy of Malay primacy and patronage politics. One defining event worth mentioning came in 1987 with the splitting of Umno into Team A and Team B, the former led by Dr Mahathir and the latter by Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah.

This split eventually led to Dr Mahathir forming the current day UMNO, with the purging of contenders from Team B and the election of only his loyal allies into the party.

As the late veteran journalist Barry Wain wrote, as Dr Mahathir mixed business with politics, cronies began to mushroom. This inevitably inculcated a strong culture of dogmatic loyalty that pivots around members’ interests instead of the national interest. Examples such as the Bumiputera Malaysia Finance scandal, the misuse of government funds in the cattle project, colloquially dubbed the “cowgate scandal”, and the current 1MDB scandal are illustrative of this.

Fast forward to contemporary times, and the legacy of the Mahathir era still lingers as the culture of loyalty is still greatly promoted.

To be sure, there is nothing wrong with promoting loyalty within a party. However, it should be accompanied by allowing space for party members to question and to debate.

Although party leaders will pay lip service to contention within the party, the reality is that such contention is not widely encouraged. Instead, when a party cadre chooses to go against the party line, he may at best be seen as committing an act of betrayal; at worst, he will be sacked.

Compounding this is the fact that there is little demarcation between what is loyalty to the party and what is loyalty to the president of the party and hence, even constructive questioning can be construed as an act of disloyalty to the party.

 

LACK OF a SUCCESSION PLAN

 

Aside from that, the party’s continuous strategy of rallying supporters through the racial narrative is a double-edged sword.

While a racial narrative is most likely to secure a network of supporters, it is also unlikely to be sustainable in the long run because younger educated Malays may find such a narrative archaic.

And when members are trained to view the party merely as a default provider, it could stunt productivity and healthy competition. Beyond that, it will also dent the legitimacy of the party in the wider society.

Perhaps the most critical challenge facing the party is that there seems to be a shortage of the kind of competent and visionary leaders seen in the past.

Gone, perhaps, are the days when an Umno leader is celebrated as a “founding father” or “father of development” in Malaysia. Unlike their predecessors, the current leaders are still struggling to earn a strong mandate as the rightful leaders of the nation.

More than that, it appears that there is a lack of conscious effort in grooming the next generation of leaders who can reconcile the dual role of managing Umno as both a ruling party and a communal one.

No thanks to its culture of dogmatic loyalty, even when visionary leaders emerge, they may be considered as potential threats to existing leaders.

This explains why the party has never really been able to transform itself radically from the Mahathir days. Despite its enviable longevity, Umno, it seems, is now a party that seeks only seeks to survive from one election to the next.

Looking back, Umno has indeed been responsible for some remarkable achievements, such as alleviating the poverty of the Malays and propelling the nation to where it is today.

Its resilience is also something that not many ruling parties in the world can emulate.

Yet, one cannot help but wonder whether loyalty and an entrenched patronage system are sufficient for the party to perpetuate its longevity. And if they are, at what expense?

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Choong Pui Yee, a PhD Candidate at Monash University (Malaysia), was previously a senior analyst at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.

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