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Muizzu’s ‘sacking’ games amid sagging economy, shaky India-China balance – Firstpost

Muizzu’s ‘sacking’ games amid sagging economy, shaky India-China balance – Firstpost



By advancing his date with destiny much earlier than anticipated, Maldives’ President Mohamed Muizzu has caught invisible dissidents within his ruling People’s National Congress (PNC) by surprise—leaving them with little choice but to fall in line. One-time guide and self-appointed godfather, Parliament speaker Abdul Raheem Abdulla, known by his popular name, ‘Adhurey’ until not very long ago, was left gasping after Muizzu unceremoniously sacked his son Ibrahim Faisal, the all-important minister for the mainstay tourism sector.

The fact that Parliament is due to meet for the customary, annual presidential address on February 6 made it as much exciting as it was confusing—at least up to the point when the Adhurey camp seemingly sued for peace and Muizzu let it go, at least for now. In forgotten circumstances from the nation’s chaotic democracy experience since 2008, the then Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) Opposition made international headlines by not even permitting President Mohamed Waheed Hassan Manik to even enter the chamber for delivering the presidential address in 2013.

In the present instance, Adhurey, who is the PNC chairman and is scheduled to be in New Delhi on an official visit as speaker later this month, was away in Malaysia when son Faisal received the sack order, which wasn’t expected any time soon, despite the growing distance between the top two. In early social media posts and media interviews before landing in the capital Male, Adhurey claimed that there was ‘no basis for Faisal’s dismissal’ and agreed that it ‘won’t have happened if the ties (with the President) are good’.

Unlike expected, he avoided meeting the local media on arrival and went on a silent mode after reportedly being told to shut up or else he might be voted out and replaced by deputy speaker Ahmed Nazim, incidentally a cousin and confidant of the president. For Team Muizzu, PNC parliamentary group leader Ibrahim Falah declared that they had no intention of replacing Adhurey.

Indications are that the ruling clique has since quieted after early preparations when enough hints emerged that the speaker was in no mood to revolt, at least not as yet. But it was not before Faisal modified his early bold claims of having a ‘stronger political future’ after his sacking to declaring his continued loyalty to President Muizzu and ending the one-sided discourse by announcing his retirement to native Fonadhoo Island (as if for good).

Not the first time

This is not the first time Muizzu has sacked or swapped ministers and ministries without taking the concerned people into confidence. In the first such surprise shake-up in September, he shifted foreign minister Moosa Zameer to finance and replaced him with then health minister Abdullah Khallel. Incumbent finance minister Mohammed Shafeeq ended up quitting office while Abdullah Nazim Ibrahim from the President’s Office took charge of health. None protested then, and none has protested now, either.

Reports now indicate that Muizzu’s ‘silent sacking’ has often taken the other side by surprise, though no one claims that any of the previous shifts and sacks were due to suspicions about their continued loyalty to the throne. That was the case this time, too, but Adhurey was not as less ambitious or overambitious as the rest before him.

If nothing else, from the day Muizzu was elected president, palace gossip had revolved around faceless detractors moving early on to have him and his ‘loyalty-suspect’ (?) vice president Hussain Mohamed Latheef impeached, with a two-thirds majority vote in Parliament, to be followed by a 60-day reign by the speaker. Though the Constitution mandates that the stop-gap incumbent should vacate in favour of a newly-elected president within 60 days, theories have floated around from day one of the current democratic Constitution in 2008 about how a speaker in such a place still enjoyed all powers, including the power to proclaim an emergency.

According to insiders, Adhurey is not the first big-ticket victim of Muizzu’s deceptive looks and behaviour. Before him, Muizzu’s one-time political boss and mentor, former President Abdulla Yameen, had taken him as a lightweight and is still paying for it.

In Yameen’s case, when he wanted his PPM-PNC combine to boycott the presidential poll of 2023 after the Supreme Court had endorsed the election commission’s denial of nomination for him owing to a pending criminal appeal by him, Muizzu appeared from near nowhere and made it. At the time, Adhurey was believed to be the brain behind the closely guarded operation, which made Muizzu the first ‘last-minute candidate’ to have won a nationwide presidential election anywhere in the world.

If there is a near-parallel elsewhere, it’s in the much bigger and most powerful US of A last year, when then vice president Kamala Harris became the last-minute replacement for Democrat incumbent Joe Biden in the presidential poll of November. However, it all ended there, as ‘disruptor par excellence’ Donald Trump won a second term—that too after having lost the re-election bid when in office, four years back.

By the looks of it, Muizzu may have overcome anticipated hiccups in the upcoming Parliament session and also outside in matters of street politics as far as his ruling PNC party is concerned. All eyes are thus riveted on the Supreme Court, which, beginning February 17, is now set to hear constitutional challenges to the controversial anti-defection law, among others, from the previous year.

The court has already permitted the opposition Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) and the breakaway Democrats of former President and one-time MDP chief, Mohammed ‘Anni’ Nasheed, as interveners. Yameen’s newly founded People’s National Front (PNF) has not expressed any such desire to join the Supreme Court thus far, and he too has dismissed the internal developments in the ruling party, saying that neither sacked minister Faisal nor his speaker-father Adhurey had his ‘sympathy’.

Barring rare occasions, Maldivian courts are not known to unduly drag or delay case hearings, especially on constitutional matters. One such exception pertained to two criminal cases still pending against Yameen from his presidential term (2013-18). The Supreme Court has since reserved orders on a prosecution appeal against a high court verdict that upturned the trial court’s admission of fresh evidence against Yameen in the second of the three cases initiated by the successor MDP government of President Ibrahim ‘Ibu’ Solih.

While the Supreme Court acquitted Yameen in the first case after the two lower courts had convicted and sentenced him to terms that denied him his re-election bid, a third case is still pending trial in the criminal court. Yameen loyalists are no more miffed at the Muizzu dispensation not fast-tracking proceedings in either of the two pending cases after the President-elect obtained shifting the other to ‘home imprisonment’ by the losing Solih leadership.

Until the last quarter of the previous year, Nazim also used to make out-of-turn comments, both in parliamentary committees and outside, on the need for hard choices in the economy and early. Indications are that Nazim’s silence in the matter may be linked to the government’s overall disinterest in fast-tracking economic reforms, especially debt restructuring that can have consequences from 2026.

On dared invisible dissidents from within his ruling People’s National Congress (PNC), especially in the strongest ever parliamentary group for an incumbent. Though it was nothing to go by in terms of optics, Muizzu’s sudden sacking of cabinet colleague Ibrahim Faisal, the otherwise low-profile minister in charge of the high-profile tourism ministry, that too ahead of the commencement of the calendar year’s parliamentary session with the customary presidential address on 6 February, has caused subterranean stirs within the ruling party and the parliamentary group.

For the unversed, Faisal is the son of the once-powerful Parliament Speaker Abdul Raheem Abdulla, whom the local media used to refer to by his popular name, ‘Adhurey’, until not very long ago. Though the President’s Office has maintained stoic silence on the reason for Faisal’s dismissal, the local media has also stopped speculating why he was not asked to resign if Muizzu was unhappy with his conduct as minister—fingers point to possible misfeasance in the allotment of resort islands behind the President’s back.

Of immediate concern for observers of the Maldivian scene, both within the country and outside, was Adhurey’s reaction, his next move, rather a counter-move. The speaker was in Malaysia when his son was sacked and reportedly rushed back to Male, as the ubiquitous-yet-unseen ‘Hassan Kurusee’ posted on social media. Former President and Democratic Party founder Mohammed ‘Anni’ Nasheed has repeatedly denied that he was behind the ‘assumed name’ but Hassan Kurusee’s posts are known not only for their political predictability but also accuracy in official matters, scams, and the like.

Before he went off the radar, reportedly on the instructions of the boss, Adhurey had pithily claimed that there was ‘no basis for Faisal’s dismissal’ and it ‘won’t have happened if the ties (with the President) are good’. He said that he learnt about the sacking only from his son, who had received a surprising letter from the president, and added that Faisal had worked with ‘sincerity and produced results’.

Not a well-known political figure like his father, Faisal has since claimed that he visualised a ‘stronger political role’ for him but did not elaborate. As an afterthought, it would seem, Faisal, in a social media post, thanked the president for ‘giving me the opportunity to serve as tourism minister’ and said the ‘government was cooperative during his tenure’.

Muizzu has since seemingly consolidated his hold further on the party and government after his highly controversial anti-defection law had done its bit for him last year. After assigning the all-important tourism ministry to the care of environment minister Thoriq Ibrahim, the president ordered the merger of the two ministries under the former’s care, thus doing away with the need to appoint a new minister in Faisal’s place.

Sliding popularity graph

Despite claims to the contrary, political pundits in the country have claimed that Muizzu’s popularity has been on the down swing for months now, after his perceived failure to restore the nation’s sagging economy and playing the India-China ‘balancing act’ as ineffectively as some of his predecessors, to the possible detriment of the nation in the coming months and years.

The government’s inability to control prices and cut down tariffs and taxes despite promises to the contrary from before the presidential election in 2023 has not gone down well with the masses who had voted for him only with such hopes and aspirations. Adding to the government’s woes is Muizzu’s conceptually meaningful effort at shoring up the nation’s ever-precarious forex reserves by introducing a dollar-deposit scheme for tourism resorts, the mainstay of the nation’s economy, and other high-end earners, which have nearly flopped, owing to bad planning and poor execution.

The overnight direction for the tourism industry to deposit a share of their dollar earnings in designated bank accounts, in return for the local currency, rufiyaa, only ended up making Muizzu an enemy of the all-powerful tourism czars, who continue to fancy themselves as much as king-makers as deal-makers. In a way, Muizzu’s attempt to break their backs and make the industry accountable to the Treasury, which has been a crying need of the nation’s economic planning, may have shaken his government’s stability without anyone acknowledging it.

For now, ruling PNC parliamentary group leader Ibrahim Fallah has claimed that the president enjoyed 100 per cent support from the 77-strong coalition in a House of 93 members. With the seven Independents who pledged their support to the Muizzu leadership after last year’s parliamentary election, his People’s National Congress (PNC) has a total of 73 members. The other four came from three alliance partners, two of them headed by rich representatives of the tourism industry and the other from the equally important construction sector.

Quiet moves

Fallah also declared that there was no plan to replace Speaker Adhurey, but the local media, quoting unnamed party sources, has claimed that quiet moves are already on in that direction. In focus as the possible replacement is deputy speaker Ahmed Nazim, a cousin of Muizzu who had held the same position during President Yameen’s tenure (2013-18). Though he does not have much of a role in his substantive position, as a chair/member of various parliamentary committees, Nazim, at one point, used to recommend harsh economic measures, as if he were speaking the mind of President Muizzu.

Though the speaker has a say in the conduct of Parliament’s daily proceedings, which a predecessor in ‘Anni’ Nasheed was seen as misusing and abusing during the presidency of then-party colleague Solih, the concerns for an incumbent run deeper. Under the 2008 democratic Constitution, the speaker is the third in the line of succession and can be president for 60 days to conduct fresh elections if both the presidency and his deputy’s chair fell vacant.

The fact that the Constitution does not restrict his powers during those 60 days and the ‘incumbent’ could even proclaim emergency and delay presidential polls if he can carry Parliament with him has been nightmarish for incumbent Presidents over the past decade and a half. It is worse in the case of Muizzu, as the buzz has been that as party chairman, Adhurey chose most of the PNC’s parliamentary candidates, and that they may owe their loyalty to him more than to the presidency or the person of incumbent Muizzu.

Even without it, there have been constant reports, many of them motivated, that Muizzu’s bete noire Yameen is gaining in popularity—but no one has produced any evidence on record, despite his newly-floated Progressive National Front (PNF) drawing a huge blank in the parliamentary polls, along with Nasheed’s Democrats. The main opposition Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) of former President Solih, headed by the party’s well-known international diplomat, Abdulla Shahid, had to make do with 12 MPs, thus posing no threat to Muizzu government’s stability.

Cloud and question

For the record, the stirrings within the government are a textbook example of internal fractures within the ruling dispensation showing up when the political opposition was weak. It happened to the previous Solih leadership when, again, the opposition did not measure up, and the Nasheed-led rebellion against the president of his choice frustrated not only party cadres and supporters but the entire governmental system and machinery through much of the five-year term. It was also the main cause for Solih losing his re-election bid and a last-minute surprise rival in Muizzu making it. There is thus a lesson in it for the current rulers, too.

Yet, with the odds thus purportedly stacked in favour of the government’s parliamentary majority, all eyes are now riveted on the Supreme Court, which has now fixed a February 17 hearing on a petition challenging the anti-defection law and three other constitutional amendments hurried through parliamentary committees and the full House in just nine hours without proper discussion or national discourse of any kind last year. Significantly, the Supreme Court has also permitted two opposition parties, namely, the MDP and breakaway Democrats, to be ‘interveners’ in the case. Team Yameen seems indifferent to the court proceedings. Yameen himself has said that he had no ‘sympathy’ for the sacked minister Faisal or if his father is removed as Speaker.

Detractors feel that minus the anti-defection law that has disempowered ruling party MPs to cast a ‘conscience vote’ on matters before Parliament, the government’s majority may come under a question in due course. At an MDP rally, the first major one against this government after Muizzu became president in November 2023, party chairman Ibrahim Faizal dared the SC judges to stand up in defence of the people’s constitutional rights in the matters before them, submitting that the judiciary has remained the only beacon light in a country that is otherwise muddled.

Maldivian courts have rarely taken a long time to dispose of cases, and no one should be surprised if the Supreme Court’s verdict in the anti-defection law case comes at the end of the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan, end-March. One such delay, however, pertained to the second of the three money-laundering cases during the Solih dispensation, when the High Court seemingly took an extraordinarily long time to dispose of his appeal against the trial court handing down an 11-year conviction.

The Supreme Court has since heard interlocutory petitions against the high court’s non-admittance of fresh documentary evidence for the prosecution and has reserved the order. In the first of the three cases, the Supreme Court had acquitted Yameen of wrongdoing while the third case is yet to be taken up by the trial court, for reasons best known to the presiding judges.

Mid-term referendum

Periodically since the parliamentary elections, the social media has been aghast with the number of ruling party MPs who might be Yameen’s ‘stooges’ or ‘Trojan horses’, or those of vice president, Hussain Mohamed Latheef, whom media speculation since before the parliamentary poll has forced to bend backwards to prove his loyalty to Muizzu. Yet, there is no gainsaying the fact that Muizzu had ‘stolen’ Yameen’s solid, 40 per cent vote bank, which had moved away from half-brother Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, who in turn was president for 30 long years.

The EC, over time, has wound up all three parties founded by Gayoom since, for failure to meet the 3000-member mark mandated under the law. The loss of the last of the three Gayoom parties, Maumoon Reform Movement (MRM), in a way owed to his joining hands with the ideological MDP rival to defeat Yameen, by now his estranged half-brother in office, in the presidential poll of 2018. Incidentally, Muizzu will get his first chance to prove his continued voter support, either way, in next year’s nationwide island council elections, which in a way will be a ‘mid-term referendum’ on his leadership of the government and the party.

All of it now has cast shadows over President Muizzu’s ability to rough it out and still come out on top, now or in the next presidential poll, due as far away as 2028. Though with a thin 12-member presence in Parliament, the MDP Opposition sounded the bugle, with a well-attended, equally disciplined, uneventful rally for the ‘Protection of Democracy’ rally in the capital. The party has promised to take the protest to the atolls and islands, calling upon Muizzu to withdraw ‘anti-democratic’ measures or/and quit. Incidentally, this is the first major MDP protest against Muizzu after he became president in November 2023.

The MDP still suffers from little realisation that for them to become acceptable to the larger electorate, they would also have to come up with convincing proposals to address the economic ills of the individual and the nation. This is because the voter still blames the predecessor Solih leadership, its stuck-up wayward policy decisions that blamed the Covid lockdown for everything under the sun, and the inability/unwillingness to manage the Nasheed-led dissent within despite commanding more than a two-thirds majority in parliament through the five years in office.

According to PNC insiders, Muizzu has inherited another of Solih’s qualities, of not being accessible to the party’s second line and parliamentarians. Both have little realisation that their original constituencies still owed to the personal charisma of their mentors, namely Yameen in the case of Muizzu and Nasheed in Solih’s instance. Yet, when the chips were down, traditional MDP voters still stood by Solih, but not before the delay had cost him dearly in the form of a 7.5 per cent vote share of the breakaway Democrats under Nasheed, which in a way contributed to his defeat in his re-election bid, circa 2023.

The writer is a Chennai-based Policy Analyst & Political Commentator. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.



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