COMMENT When Zaid Ibrahim joined PKR in June 2009, less than a year after resigning on a matter of principle from Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi’s cabinet, there was a role waiting for him more certainly than there had been one in Abdullah’s team when the latter abruptly appointed him de facto law minister in March the previous year.

Basking in public esteem over his decision to quit because he disagreed with the ISA detentions in September of 2008 of controversial blogger Raja Petra Kamarudin, DAP MP Teresa Kok and journalist Tan Hoon Cheng, Zaid found himself propelled into the role of policy coordinator for the opposition Pakatan Rakyat.

Though there was never such a position in the lexicon of the opposition, the candidate and the role met in near perfect unison.   

Pakatan, improbable in its beginnings as a loose grouping for electoral purposes of PKR, DAP and the Islamic fundamentalist PAS, was in need of a common platform.

That need became pressing after Anwar Ibrahim had pulled off the biggest feat of Malaysia’s post-May 13th history by barnstorming the country to deny BN its customary two-thirds majority in the general election of March 2008.

Coming as it did with control of an unprecedented five state legislatures (Perak has since reverted through chicanery to BN), Anwar’s tour de force made feasible things previously held to be inconceivable.      

Zaid fell in easily with this mood of the newly possible.

This was enticing to Zaid. He had found quitting Abdullah’s cabinet easy to do because the judicial reforms for which the former PM had selected him to push ran into heavy weather caused by erstwhile cabinet colleagues, Rais Yatim and Syed Hamid Albar.

The latter fought a rearguard action on behalf of former premier Dr Mahathir Mohamad, the likeliest to be shamed if judicial reforms proposed by Zaid had gone through. Abdullah remained non-committal in these intra-cabinet battles.

A Johnny-come-lately

Within weeks of his arrival in PKR, Zaid found grating the jealousy a Johnny-come-lately is apt to stir among the entrenched and the longer-serving.

A seasoned politician would have found aspects of his reception par for the course. But not Zaid Ibrahim, a man whose wealth was amassed from the lucrative legal contracts on the North-South Highway that were steered his law firm’s way by former finance minister Daim Zainuddin.

Zaid displayed a ‘I’ve no time for all this’ hauteur whose more obvious demonstrations were the brevity of his attendances at PKR central leadership council meetings and at Wednesday night’s politburo meetings. He would leave these meetings, sometimes in less time than it took to get from his Tropicana golf resort home to the PKR headquarters nearby.

This lack of interest in the warp and woof of party affairs would have been understandable given his oft-expressed stance that he was not interested in holding high position in PKR. It would have been more understandable if he had remained focused on his immediate task which was the formulation of the common policy framework for Pakatan, to the exclusion of other concerns.

But from October 2009, Zaid began to take positions that were at variance to Anwar’s on issues like Sabah and Sarawak. Ructions in the Sabah chapter of the party saw Zaid sympathetic to forces allied to Dr Jeffrey Kitingan.  

On Sarawak, Zaid’s exertions had the same thrust which was empathy for the locals’ desire for autonomy in matters of leader- and election-candidate selection.

Invariably, Zaid’s positions were at odds with Azmin Ali’s which were influenced less by what was the best thing to do in light of PKR’s main plank – the people’s right to decide – than by who and what were good for his popularity as the presumptive party No 2.

Incumbent Dr Syed Husin Ali had already signaled that he was not interested to retain the post in the party polls that were scheduled for late 2010.

Azmin was readying for a run for deputy president. He looked on Zaid as a rival whose protestations of a lack of interest in rising in the party hierarchy were met with skepticism.

Anwar pressured by party reformers

In tandem with this rise in competitive rivalry between Azmin and Zaid was the discontent, plentifully bubbling by late 2009, felt by some factions in the party towards Anwar for what they viewed as maddening refusal to introduce changes they espoused as good for the party’s organisation and structure.

By late 2009, this faction began looking to Zaid as their candidate to become the No 2 in the party. With Zaid at deputy president, they felt they would force the changes to party structure and organisation that Anwar had disdained to introduce.

More than others in the party, Anwar possessed an appreciation of the reality that PKR was a confluence of interests tenuously uniting ideologically disparate groups.

He was the only one who could hold it together, just as he was the only one who could hold the avowedly secular DAP and the theocratic PAS together in the Pakatan coalition.

Anwar knew that any changes to the party structure and organisation that cut across the interests of his core supporters would have to be held in check because some of these supporters had already become ‘professionals’ – the party had become their whole life and vocation, and the protection of its already-in-place bureaucratic structures was more important to them than the interests of the party, or for that matter, the people it represented.

In other words, he knew the soft underbelly of the party and that he had to bide time before he could do anything about it. This was increasingly intolerable to the ‘make haste’ crowd of would-be party reformers.

THE UNMAKING OF ZAID - Part 1 l Part 2 l Part 3

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them. It is the ideal occupation for a temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent.