After embarrassing the professional-technocrat non-politician Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department, Datuk Amirsham Aziz with a planted supplementary question and a planted answer during Question Time in Parliament this morning, the Prime Minister’s son-in-law Khairy Jamaluddin (MP for Rembau) has aggravated Amirsham’s embarrassment in coming to the former banker’s defence!

Rebutting the suspicion that Amirsham was “under the thumb of the world’s richest unemployed” in reading out a prepared answer to a supplementary question which the Minister should have no prior knowledge, Khairy said:

“The minister is an intelligent man. He was the former CEO of Maybank and I’m sure he anticipated my question. The minister was looking at his facts to answer my question.”

The Oxford graduate is being most condescending in conceding the intelligence of Amirsham. But he was talking bunkum as there were no “facts” for Amirsham to “look at” in his answer to Khairy’s supplementary question. Amirsham was just reading word-for-word the “planted” answer to Khairy’s “planted” supplementary, as if afraid that he might miss out some words or phrases painstakingly prepared for him beforehand!

With such a friend, Amirsham does not need enemies!

KJ’s “kiss of death” is to be found in today’s online New Straits Times “Dewan Dispatches”, as follows:

DEWAN DISPATCHES:

The NEP question – locked, loaded and planted

By : Azmi Anshar

2008/05/15

DEWAN RAKYAT, Thurs:

THIRTY-EIGHT years gone and the New Economic Policy – while technically defunct, replaced in 1990 by the newer, too unfamiliar National Development Policy that continued engaging fundamental NEP principles – has aggrandised itself in socio-political realm and influence, still as trendy as wayfarer sunglasses in the way they keep making grand comebacks. And the NEP, in its acronym and far-reaching consequences, is “locked” as troublesome and controversial in its polemic and implementation.

Political-minded people have been cautioned that the NEP can be a multi-edged sword of political expediency and partitionary weapon – its advocators will use it to good effect to sustain a certain political advantage to impress a certain partisan crowd, but its critics can also demonise it, also for a certain political advantage for a certain partisan crowd. And that’s the blessing…and the curse of the NEP.

And in the 20 years of the NEP’s implementation (1970-1990) and 18 years since the NDP’s, has it attained its twin goals, basically to reduce absolute poverty irrespective of race and restructure society to correct economic imbalances? Well, depending on your political persuasion, the answer is a perennial yes…and no, plus some added spice of disparaging effect.

People say the NEP was ambitious and controversial for its time but its affirmative action programmes may have fulfilled some measure of the twin goals in reducing socio-economic disparity between the races while others strongly felt that it tantamount to nothing more than exalting racial supremacy.

But here’s why the NEP had also been troublesome, given the political divide over the “loaded” nature of the policy. There’s a set of politicians who think that the share of the economy for a one race, though substantially larger, was not even close to the quota fixed earlier, and that was reason enough to prolong the policy.

Then there are politicians of all stripes who express concern that one set of race may remain too reliant on another race for pure economic advancement if the NEP continues unabated. Mirror that with another group of politicians who charge that only a handful of privileged people benefited after they hijacked the policy’s noble principles and twisted it into a cesspool of endless wealth exclusive for themselves, their cronies and their families.

It’s all just too confusing. In the meantime, the NEP (anybody want to at least dabble in the NDP for a change?) is still a charm in its flavour of the moment ubiquity, every moment for many moments in the past two generations. Its mileage is extremely high and durable, it is not going to fade away but it is also not going to change any arguments, pros and cons, anytime soon. Unless politicians of all divisive segments can sit down and agree to some consensus of its success and failure.

But argumentative the NEP still is and nowhere is it more argumentative than inside the Dewan Rakyat, not just in the last 38 years, but also today, when the NEP’s linear but ageless process was subverted into a fight over the furtive nature of a supplementary question offered by Khairy Jamaluddin (BN-Rembau) over an original question he posed to rookie Cabinet Minister, Datuk Amirsham Aziz, replying in his capacity as Minister in Prime Minister’s Department in charge of the Economic Planning Unit.

In his supplementary question, Khairy asked Amirsham what he thought of Penang Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng’s (DAP-Bagan) bid to abolish the use of the NEP in the state because it breeds corruption and cronyism. “Is it fair for Lim to make a general conclusion that people who benefit from the NEP, which involved millions of students and Bumiputera professionals like yourself, a product of the policy who rose to became the CEO of the biggest bank in Malaysia, as though we are all cronies and kaki rasuah (corruptors)?” he demanded.

Amirsham duly replied that Lim’s statement was inaccurate, asserting that the Penang CM did not understand the objective of the NEP. “If that is his conclusion, then anyone who received assistance, whether in loans, job opportunities, scholarships, entrepreneurship opportunities and others, are cronies and corruptors,” he said, never mind that Guan Eng didn’t want to eradicate the NEP, only the NEP’s abuses like corruption, cronyism and economic inefficiency, besides pushing for open tenders on all Penang government contracts.

Amirsham’s reply was actually run-of-the-mill substance, all nice and proper, but the Opposition MPs noticed that the ex-Maybank CEO’s mode of answer was “too formal” when an informal, off-the-cuff reply laced with some flair and colour, was expected.

That was enough to trigger a ruckus: first from “I-can-smell-a-rat anytime” Lim Kit Siang (DAP-Ipoh Timur), who protested that the answer was “prepared”.

Other opposition MPs offered loudly their definitions of the “planted” question”:
? Chong Eng (DAP-Bukit Mertajam) shouted the P word. “It’s a planted question,” she huffed;
? Khalid Abdul Samad (PAS-Shah Alam) claimed that the question was “leaked”;
? Gobind Singh Deo (DAP-Puchong) phrased Amirsham’s reply as “mana boleh ini macam” (how can it be like this);
? Mahfuz Omar (PAS-Pokok Sena) marvelled at “siap jawapan sampai dua muka” (a reply so well-prepared it ran into two pages).

Blessed Amirsham for either being blasé or oblivious to the ruckus because he simply continued droning on into his prepared response while Deputy speaker Datuk Ronald Kiandee tried to impose some order with limited success. But the Minister did stop to give way to Dr P. Ramasamy (DAP-Batu Kawan) who asked whether Amirsham understood the true spirit of affirmative action policy. “In other countries, affirmative action is enjoyed by the minority but here in Malaysia, it is enjoyed by the majority,” Ramasamy said to a chorus of approval from his Opposition colleagues.

The Deputy Speaker made an anticipatory rebuke of the MPs for their antics and after it simmered down, everyone’s attention was on Amirsham who had to spontaneously answer Ramasamy. “Affirmative action is to help the poor and the lower-income group. It had eliminated poverty and gave equal opportunities to all,” Amirsham deadpanned a reply which merely provoked the Opposition MPs into reacting with jeers.

This prompted a rather indignant Datuk Seri Abdul Ghapur Salleh (BN-Kalabakan) to remark that the House had turned into a market. “Can we have some control in the House?” he asked the deputy Speaker, who riposte that the House was under control.

Then Azmin Ali (PKR-Gombak), who was in line to ask the next question, quipped that the House had turned into a market because the chairman was from Rembau, compelling Barisan backbenchers to hit back vociferously, lead by Khairy who demanded that Azmin retract the name-calling (What is it about KJ that attracts all these sobriquets?). Again, the deputy Speaker had to smoothen proceedings before it degenerated, restoring calm by dismissing all protests and ordering Azmin to proceed with his question.

Then again, was it a “planted” question the first place, not that it was unprecedented? Khairy denied it. “The minister is an intelligent man. He was the former CEO of Maybank and I’m sure he anticipated my question. The minister was looking at his facts to answer my question.”

However, Khairy dismissed the relevance or importance if a question was planted, insisting that the substance of the answer was far more crucial. “It’s clear the Opposition was trying to create trouble again because they are afraid of the answers.”

Like a vicious cycle, the NEP – acronym and substance and all – gets sluiced into a bum rap and made to be troublesome again. In any case, everyone suspects that at anytime soon, this explosive issue will get another round of spat for yet another round of endless entanglement. Locked, loaded or planted, it’s all just too confusing.