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DEWAN DISPATCHES: BN backbenchers simmering beef with Nazri Aziz

by: Azmi Anshar
DEWAN RAKYAT, June 25, 2008

Parliament’s clampdown on the media, if it can be described in such brutish term, has transmuted into a new, previously unrealised, dimension. After yesterday’s histrionics of abruptly erected barricades emasculating access to the lobby and the barricade’s equally abrupt removal by the BN Backbenchers’ Club, the media, for now, is free as before to go about their routine, sometimes mundane, business.

The media, thank goodness, is no longer the story. However, something else is – the intoxicatingly simmering beef between the BN Backbenchers Club and Datuk Seri Nazri Aziz, Minister in charge of Parliament Affairs. And apparently wedged between the elephantine scrape is the media, made use as unwitting pawns in a show of force to tell the world who is the “boss” of Parliament.

The scrape can be traced back to the BNBBC’s desire to revive the Parliamentary Services Act that would restore the BN MPs’ authority to run parliamentary day-to-day affairs, both in management and finances. However, the move, including one initiated by Datuk Shahrir Samad in 2005, didn’t get any traction and the concept of “retaking Parliament” died in fuss-free mode.

So, the need to extend some form of power was unleashed subtly, through press conferences on political activism, the support of certain controversial motions and the demand to meet senior Government leaders or officers, or GLC CEOs over issues of national economic concerns.

Don’t think for a moment that BNBBC’s open-source activism wasn’t appreciated by the Opposition MPs, who used the freedom to organise a welter of demonstrations and political hucksterism at the expanse called the Parliament lobby that they know would have been severely mollified had it had been organised on the streets of Kuala Lumpur.

But that was all moribund stuff until yesterday when BN BC deputy chairman Bung Moktar Radin, leading a mob of a dozen backbenchers, did the unthinkable – they marched to where the barricades were erected and removed them unceremoniously.

The way the very colourful Bung Moktar expressed his disgust with the barricades was absolutely telling. “We think the media must play its role without any obstruction. We were not told about this so we are removing it. We have no permission but we are doing it anyway.” Whether he was being openly defiant of the power-that-be who ordered the barricades or playing the politician’s populist game to curry favour with the Press is immaterial. Bung Moktar’s action was solely lasered at a certain power-that-be.

And that power-that-be exploded today in anger: Minister in the Prime Minister's Department Datuk Seri Nazri Aziz charged that Bung Moktar and his BBC gang have “no power” to remove the barricades. Nazri qualified his fuming backlash by saying that the House Speaker had said that he will make a decision on the matter and the BNBBC should have waited for it.

How deep this resentment goes is anyone’s guess but if you were to gauge it from the assurance BNBBC chairman Datuk Seri Tiong King Sing gave to the Press, you would think it was a whole lot deeper than anyone may think. "If you have any trouble, come and see me," he said, intimating that the BNBBC was prepared to confront head-on with whatever Nazri is going to set loose against the club or its leaders.

The BNBBC has always maintained a cordial relationship with Nazri but after this tawdry episode, the show of force has reared its nebulous head and everyone working in the inner sanctum of Parliament house will wait in bated anticipation on the next move of either side of these two colliding forces to outwit and perhaps disembowel one another.

This time, the Press should be able to take up a first class seat to witness and chronicle the clash dispassionately, and not be budgrafted into its theatrical script again.