HOT!! UMNO's Line-up??!

UMNO's Line-up

Well Saturday 21 September has come and gone. It is obvious, recorded for posterity now, that UMNO has some cojones and also lacks plenty cojones.

Lets look at the three guys doing the "lets hold hands" thingy here. Talk is these three have a pact of sorts amongst themselves. All three are going for the VP position. Conventional wisdom now says that only one of these three will win a VP seat. Those who lose the VP posts (from this group) will still remain in the Cabinet as Ministers but their political careers in UMNO will be significantly dashed. This is bound to happen.

The VP's position is being contested by six candidates in total including the hugely popular Mukriz Mahathir, Ali Rustam and Isa Samad.  (I already blogged this earlier and also ran a poll on all these six candidates).  It looks like Mukriz, Zahid and Ali Rustam will prevail.

I hope that will be the  case and that it will bring significant changes to UMNO.

The president's post has been won uncontested by the incumbent Najib Razak. Again this is where UMNO has not developed the cojones to be able to accept and sustain challenges for all positions. The party will split if there are challenges. This reflects poorly on the maturity of UMNO. The party is 67 years old but the remnants of feudal thinking still shackle the party. UMNO has to think hard and seriously about this. UMNO bukan DAP bro. UMNO mesti jadi jaguh demokrasi tulin dalam negara kita.

To some extent increasing the voter base to 150,000 for Majlis Tertinggi and above and 75,000 for Ketua Wanita and Pemuda is a big step. But what is the use of making all these amendments when there are no challenges at the top positions? 

The bigger surprises are in the Ketua Wanita and Ketua Pemuda contests.  The Ketua Pemuda Khairy Jamaludin is in a peculiar position. He is hugely unpopular among the thinking folk and those who are not mesmerised by oratory.  The last time the UMNO people got carried away by oratory, a tiga suku, main belakang Tamil actor almost became the Prime Minister. 

However Khairy seems to have got the blessings of the president as well as the three people holding hands in the picture above.  Since they are not the brightest stars in the sky that certainly does not bode well either. 

However, thanks to their more youthful cojones perhaps, three challengers have come forward to take on Khairy Jamaludin. Of the three I can only recall one - Akhramsyah Sanusi who is a serious challenger for the Ketua Pemuda post. I will have a separate post on Akhram later. 

Among the other two challengers, one created a huge ruckus on nomination day on Saturday when he grabbed a Quran, held it above his head and started saying angry things - all aimed at Khairy Jamaluddin, about corruption and about money politics. As I said Khairy is hugely unpopular. 

Here is a video clip from the UMNO elections FOUR years ago in 2009. Khairy had just been "elected" Ketua Pemuda (after a mysterious 7 hour vote count). Those are UMNO Youth and other UMNO people shouting and screaming in the video. They are shouting 'Rasuah, rasuah. rasuah'.

There is something else I would like you to notice. There are no bloggers in the video. It was 2009. Masa itu OutSyed The Box pun tak ada. So jangan marah saya tak tentu pasal. Jangan tuduh saya pula. This has been going on for the past FOUR years.

Also there is a awareness in UMNO that in the last PRU13 the Pemuda boys were nowhere to be seen doing the campaigning for the party.

That calon Ketua Pemuda who went berserk last Saturday obviously has a lot of pent up feelings. As I said, among many people, their feelings have not changed much.

Finally coming to the Wanita the daughter of the late Sulaiman Palestin - who is known as Raihan Sulaiman - is challenging Shahrizat Abdul Jalil for the Ketua Wanita. There is a groundswell of sorts against Shahrizat too. Again the negative perception is about money. They have coined a word 'tabulela' (tak boleh lah). And like the Pemuda, the Wanita too did not come out in force to campaign for the party at the recent PRU13. It is not likely that Shahrizat will lose. 

However Raihan Sulaiman's father the late Sulaiman Palestin became a giant killer. He stood against the ineffective Hussein Onn around 1979. Sulaiman lost but he did manage to get about a third of the votes against Hussein Onn. This was a huge slap in the face for Hussein Onn whose career went downwards after that. He finally resigned in 1981. 

The entry of Mukriz for VP, Akhramsyah for Ketua Pemuda, Raihan Sulaiman for Ketua Wanita and even that Quran thumping guy into the race has another element to it. They are backed by a very, very strong undercurrent that is unhappy with the party president and the coterie of lame ducks and  gatekeepers (folks he wont be reading this either - I found out that the president hardly reads anything other than praise) who are running UMNO into the ground.

In my reckoning these candidates will not only get substantial votes on their own accord (for example Mukriz and Akhramsyah) but they will garner plenty of protest votes as well.  

Raihan may or may not win against Shahrizat but every vote for her will be a protest vote against the president. 

The money has also started flowing.