Four tops in a danse macabre?

Anwar and PKR have long been keen to throw a log on this bonfire and no one is now barring their way.

COMMENT

It is hardly surprising that Anwar Ibrahim has been willing to step up to bowl, if MACC is willing to bat, over allegations concerning Daim Zainuddin. There is no love lost between the two former Finance Ministers; Anwar campaigned in 2008 to recoup the purported billions swiped from the country’s coffers under the financial stewardship of Daim.

Can there now be a nexus between Najib Razak and Anwar all of a sudden, just because Najib’s former aide Ariff Sabri says so?

People should bear in mind that Daim and Ariff have been acquainted for a long time, and Ariff Sabri became well-known for his insider tales and political punditry through the “Oracle of Syed Putra”, a name he coined for Daim’s alter ego or go-between, who regularly fed choice morsels of gossip and prophecies as ammunition for Ariff’s Sakmongkol AK47 blog.

Certainly he would lend a hand to a friend in need, what are friends for, after all: without Daim, Sakmongkol’s AK47 might have been firing blanks.

Anwar, being Anwar, has little to lose: every day that he remains out of prison is another day in paradise, another day to dish it back to those who cast him out into the wilderness.

It is not impossible that desperate men might resort to desperate measures but it might be too much in the way of conjecture to trace a line between Anwar and the Prime Minister. A more likely scenario would be that Anwar and PKR have long been keen to throw a log on this bonfire and no one is now barring their way. Neither is anyone offering Anwar any matches: Anwar comes with a box of his own.

What is curious is not that Anwar is willing to tell what he knows but that MACC is even showing an interest in a bigwig like Daim.

It is no secret that Daim ruffled feathers in the highest places in recent months, a crescendo reaching an apex of sorts for the wily old fox. They say that the good you do comes back to you, but the evil that you do stays with you — so his famous political craft has come back to annoy him like a boomerang. Or perhaps the boomerang had been in his pocket all the while.

Malaysians get so excited by conspiracy theories that this ranks up there with the foreign model known mostly for the ghastly circumstances of her death, being blown to bits in a murder with no apparent motive.

Are our lives so dulled by religious restrictions that we are only energised by the carrion stench of scandals hitting the fan? Are Korean pop and drama now off limits by religious advisories yet to be pronounced? We take so much joy in seeing rich guys being pilloried that it appears we also have a big appetite for heavyweight mudslinging.

Regardless of supposed hidden motives or directives, it is still interesting to see MACC moving on a big fish for a change: one is definitely an orca by Umno standards, if the other Tun be the blue whale. However, all too often, the anticipation of ripe fruit over the coming weeks will be doused with a disappointing cold shower at the threshhold of the Attorney-General’s Chambers.

Are we not, after all living in the oddly functioning house that the Tun built? He knows which doors won’t open and which windows won’t shut. He still believes he has the right to be protective about who holds the keys, even if he vacated the penthouse a while ago.

If PM Najib is sensitive about being reviled then he must also be sensitive to the electorate perceiving an unholy alliance were he to hitch-up with Anwar. If the electorate is fast becoming disillusioned with PAS’s poor fit into Pakatan Rakyat, they would certainly balk at the thought of a union between PM Najib and Anwar Ibrahim.