COMMENT After weeks of trying to ward off the Bersih march planned for this weekend by sniping at it through proxies, Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak has reached for the jingo card to illegitimise the march.
Weeks of his silence on the matter betokened an attitude of watching the pros and cons of a fluid situation to see how he can exploit evolving matters to his advantage.
When developments on the issue did not furnish him this opportunity, Najib has reached for the card that Dr Samuel Johnson, trenchant foe of political and other types of cant, said is the last refuge of scoundrels: patriotism.
The PM has just said that Bersih - organisers of the planned 34-hour march tomorrow and the day after by a legion of protesters whose outsize numbers may well spur a contemplated parliamentary no-confidence motion against him - is dishonouring the Merdeka Day anniversary by choosing to demonstrate just when the country is set to celebrate.
By jingo, he hopes to dampen the enthusiasm for the march whose popularity is threatening to spread like a contagion.
Bersih’s three previous marches in Kuala Lumpur had caused apprehension in the ruling authority because an in-gathering of outsize crowds with protest on their minds is always disconcerting to powers that be.
Bersih’s obvious response to a charge of disloyalty would be that a higher loyalty to the founding ideals of the nation impels them to call out a street protest just when the annual commemoration of the event that inaugurated the country is set to take place.
Najib has reached for the jingo card when all other weapons in his arsenal have been used and found to be unavailing.
All it takes now is for the size and racial diversity of the marchers to signal that his government is down for the count.
If the crowds at the march are in excess of the 250,000 that turned up for the Bersih 3 march in January 2013 - indications are mounting that the size will be comparable if not superior - the momentum for the PM’s removal will be quickened.
A while ago, with one princeling after another, declaring their support for the PM to stay on in office, it seemed that Najib had all the avenues for his removal effectively blocked.
Ongoing media disclosures
But a combination of ongoing media disclosures of the shenanigans in 1MDB, the scandal-plagued sovereign wealth fund that has hung like an albatross around his neck, and the tendency of assorted individuals with some responsibility for the issue’s investigation to pop up with salacious details always threatened to blow the cover off Najib’s shaky alibis.
These credibility-stripping developments were certain to be disastrous to the PM if not stopped or if that was not possible, countered effectively.
It appears that neither a cessation to leaks nor a counter strategy when these happened is working for him.
This is normally a predicament that compels the one to run up the white flag of surrender.
But Najib is not going to yield and that is because the alternative must be too ghastly to even contemplate.
Now that he has reached for the patriotism card, he is saying that by jingo he wants to stay even it it means that from the legal standpoint, he simply has no other course but to walk the plank.
It’s sterile to speculate on the what-might-have-been but Umno should not have allowed him, coming as he did into the top office with the baggage he had, to assume the premiership.
Now the party is saddled with a millstone around its neck, liberation from which can only come if a rump of the party joins with a united opposition in a parliamentary motion to rid the country of a leader who is economic and political deadweight.
A massive gathering of Bersih protesters this weekend will make the motion unstoppable.
A gigantic display of ‘people's power’ in the streets must necessarily precede a riddance vote in Parliament.
TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others.
