By Mariam Mokhtar

You’re on your first date with a prospective beau and you observe that his teeth have the tell tale signs of not being brushed and his nails are unkempt. Do you bother to check on the rest of his body before dumping him?

Now just imagine that your date is Umno-Baru.

Last week, Berita Harian quoted Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi as saying: “Umno tidak sekotor sebagaimana persepsi tulisan wartawan yang tidak beretika.” Here’s a literal translation: “Umno is not as dirty as perceived by unethical journalists.” That’s a virtual admission that there’s indeed some dirt on Umno-Baru. Zahid would not, or dared not, claim that his party was clean.

He was telling us what we already knew, and that’s not good enough. He should have explained how he intended to clean up the party instead of gabbing on about the responsibility or irresponsibility of journalists.

Cleaning up a political party is not like picking up a biscuit that has dropped to the floor and blowing on it. Doing this will not kill the germs. Cleaning up Umno-Baru cannot be as simple as using anti-bacterial wipes. The process involves deep, invasive surgery.

There is so much dirt on Umno-Baru that Zahid will have a hard time trying to convince us that the party is not reprehensible.

So how dirty is Umno-Baru?

Zahid’s incredible feat of pulling numbers out of thin air is another miracle that only Umno-Baru can pull off. He claimed that 87% of the information given by online writers was incorrect. How had he come up with such an absolute figure? It wasn’t rounded up to 80% or 90%. Perhaps he would like to share with us the formula he used.

Soon after Zahid became the Deputy PM, he told opposition politicians and disgruntled Malaysians to leave the country if they were unhappy with the electoral system. He has failed to apologise for this insulting remark. We elect our politicians, and we expect them to perform and not lord it over us.

We do not want our senior politicians to fraternise with crooks and the criminal underworld. In October 2013, at an event in Malacca, Zahid told his audience that he had friends in the notorious Tiga Line gang. He has also been quoted as saying that the police would shoot suspected criminals first and ask questions later. Of course, he would claim that he had been misquoted, but that’s standard practice among Umno-Baru politicians. They back pedal when the rakyat is outraged by their statements.

Mariam Mokhtar is an FMT columnist.

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