Can Ahmad Bashah regain Kedah for BN?
For Datuk Ahmad Bashah Md Hanipah, it is the key to breaking Pakatan Rakyat’s (PR) hold over the minds of Kedahans and putting their belief back in the BN.
After a Chinese New Year dinner in late February, he had stated that 1 Malaysia’s message of inclusiveness was bringing the Chinese community back into the BN, which is key to winning Kedah’s mixed seats.
“Kedahans have seen that PR cannot fulfil their promises. Their confidence is returning to us,” declares Ahmad Bashah, Kedah Umno’s liaison chief and the man handpicked by BN chairman Datuk Seri Najib Razak in January this year to spearhead the national coalition’s take-over of Kedah.
For the four-term assemblyman, 1 Malaysia’s tenet of unity extends to how state governments should be in sync with the coalition holding federal power. He believes only this will move Kedah forward.
A straw poll of 70 Kedahans conducted by The Malaysian Insider, however, challenges the claim that 1 Malaysia is sparking wide interest among the public.
Though he is a veteran leader among Umno leaders and BN allies, Ahmad Bashah’s appeal does not percolate down to the man-on-street or even among many Umno supporters.
He also has to deal with the clawing factionalism in Kedah Umno’s 15 divisions. It was partly the back-stabbing within divisions over who was chosen as candidates in the 12th general election that derailed their machinery and turned off the party’s supporters.
A northern Kedah Umno division leader describes the fight ahead as steep and hard for Ahmad Bashah and the BN. Even though the PR administration has been less-than-stellar, BN must endure painful changes if it wants Kedahans to take them back.
A familiar hand
Ahmad Bashah was a senior leader in the Kedah BN state Cabinet prior to 2008. He takes over the state Umno and BN leadership from Umno vice-president Datuk Seri Mohd Shafie Apdal, who was more of an interim appointee after Kedah fell to PR.
The former businessman started being active in Umno at about the same time “Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi became a deputy education minister”.
A consummate party man, he worked his way up from a branch leader to a youth leader in the Alor Star division before becoming its head. He first contested and won the Bakar Bata state seat (which was then called Alor Merah) in the 1995 elections.
In an interview with The Malaysian Insider, Ahmad Bashah said his main message to Kedahans was the importance of returning to BN to power in order to get the necessary investment and funds to grow Kedah.
“Datuk Najib is the torch bearer of Malaysia,” he said, referring to the prime minister’s attempt at bringing development via the Economic Transformation Programme (ETP), the Government Transformation Programme (GTP) and the National Key Results Areas (NKRA) initiative.
“So we (Kedah BN) have to help Najib bring that torch to Kedah. Kedah must be ruled by the same parties that controls Putrajaya,” he adds.
This is a truism that is often overlooked. Kedah is largely a paddy-based agrarian economy. On its own, the state is unable to attract large-scale ventures in manufacturing or electronics that bring in jobs, raise local spending power and help spur small business growth.
Such previous ventures such as the Sharp Roxy plant in Sungai Petani, the Kulim High Tech Park and the Perwaja Steel plant in Gurun, were set up with the aid of federal government agencies that deal with trade.
Similarly, the big universities and colleges that are transforming Kedah’s landscape like Universiti Utara Malaysia in Changloon and AIMST University in Semeling were made possible by the Higher Education Ministry.
“We have seen that under Pakatan, the state has gone backwards. Only BN can bring it forwards.”
New line up, Same faces
Bashah admits that factionalism is a problem but insists it is manageable, claiming it is more a “perception problem among the grassroots” rather than a debilitating cancer.
“I have no problems with other division leaders. We sit together in meetings that I call’ he said.
An official with a division in central Kedah, however, claimed that although other leaders may not have a problem with Ahmad Bashah, there is still in-fighting between personalities within other divisions.
“There are people who are still lobbying to be candidates even though they lost in the last elections,’ said the official who declined to be named.
The second biggest obstacle is more intractable but is important to the voters who abandoned Umno and BN in 2008 and whom the party is courting — how is Umno supposed to inspire voters to enact change when the line-up of leaders it offers doesn’t represent that?
An Umno activist in Sungai Petani sums it up: “Except for Datuk Mukhriz (Mahathir) the rest of the Umno liaison are all old faces including Bashah. There’s no one else, ka?
“If we really want to win, we have to change the whole line up. All the old guys must go.”
Except in very rare cases, the state BN chief is marketed as the “next mentri besar” in an election.
Another party activist from Pokok Sena describes BN’s line up as insipid compared to the PR’s.
“The PR cabinet has lawyers, doctors and engineers. What do we have?”
This underscored an important element in any election where voters are ambivalent about both parties, as is the case of Kedah. A sterling candidate can rise above the humdrum of his party and that of the opposition to capture the imagination of his constituents.
And examples of this are plenty in Kedah among PR and BN candidates.
According to a veteran Kedah BN activist, “We cannot offer a transformative package if we keep offering old products in that package. Our package has to have new products.”
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