COMMENT He had long wanted it. Now that he has got it, what will he do with it?For starters, Mohamed Azmin Ali played the smartest game in town and wound up with the ace in the pack.

It was not an easy game to play, but he played it with considerable skill and not a little panache to wind up with a royal flush.

The PKR deputy president must have known some weeks ago that, as the lawyers would say, in the fluid balance of probabilities he stood the best chance of being appointed as replacement for his party’s reject, Khalid Ibrahim.

With the Selangor palace opposed to having PKR president Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail as MB of Selangor, it did not take rocket science to infer that if Pakatan Rakyat was to hold together as the ruling coalition, it must be a PKR appointee as MB if the president of the party were ruled out.

With that overarching knowledge as guide, Azmin played the party loyalist game to the hilt by backing decisions made by supremo Anwar Ibrahim and his claque in PKR, even when those meant that Azmin’s prospects of elevation were null.

Azmin did that so that no one could accuse him of breaking ranks or being a spoilt sport.

After all, loyalty to Anwar and PKR were his hallmarks, the latter allegiance being the principal reason why a sizeable majority of members ticked his number in the bewildering maze that constituted the ballot paper in the party’s disheveled polls.

After retaining with ease his deputy president’s post – this in the teeth of tacit opposition to his candidacy by the supremo – Azmin had a right to be included in PKR’s list of nominees as replacement for the out-of-favour Khalid.

With Azizah up against the road blocks of royal disapproval and Islamist strictures against her gender, Azmin knew that time – that reliably eventual winnower of grain from chaff – was on his side.

The way that the opposition within Pakatan – from his own party hierarchy and the DAP – came round with alacrity to supporting his appointment once the Selangor palace made its choice of MB official, Azmin’s intuition that time was on his side turned out to be spot-on.

Both the opposed-to-Azmin faction of PKR and the DAP knew that further protraction of this saga of who is to replace Khalid as Selangor MB was a losing gambit and so they caved in to make Azmin’s appointment by the palace unanimous.

Sweet victory

Few come-from-behind victories could have been sweeter than Azmin’s in this race to be MB once Khalid was declared the liability his proven financial acumen ought to have prevented him from becoming.

Having witnessed his party PKR and, by extension, his coalition Pakatan suffer a severe nosebleed from the ‘Replace Khalid saga’, Azmin has now not only to stanch the flow but also lead both into a shift of emphasis.

Good financial management is not so much the priority; a drainage and infrastructure inspector’s mentality would be more the requirement.

Selangor’s many pot-holed roads must be re-paved, clogged drains and canals unblocked, and dengue-spawning stagnant water and disease-spreading rubbish heaps cleared.

The commonweal of the state’s Joe Public must be taken care; judicious use of the RM3.2 billion reserve must be made towards that necessary and vote-winning end.

On April 16, Azmin made a speech on the occasion of the launch of his campaign to defend his deputy president’s post in PKR’s internal polls.

It was far and away the best formulation of the philosophy of democratic pluralism which ought to be the PKR ideology and, by extension, Pakatan’s.

Of course, the Abdul Hadi Awang wing of PAS would demur but the PAS president has become soiled goods: his dizzying gyrations in the ‘Replace Khalid saga’ have tarnished his credentials irretrievably.

How and why? The man cannot cope with pluralism. The entire texture of the country is streaked with it but Hadi Awang has only monism in mind.

By contrast, Azmin has shown agility and flexibility in coping with currents that alternately flowed against and for him, and emerged with a victory that ostensibly was not secured at the cost of the ideals of party loyalty and Pakatan’s principles.

That deserves a salute.

---

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.