Are BN leaders as ugly as Mahathir says?
If we believe the ex-PM, then it’s true that there’s a culture of greed in the ruling coalition.
Scott Ng, Free Malaysia Today
If you’ve been following the exploits of one Mahathir Mohamad, former premier and current opposition leader (or so it seems), you may remember him revealing, some time ago, that several Umno leaders had approached him to complain about Prime Minister Najib Razak. He didn’t give names, but he implied that they had realised what a disaster Najib’s leadership was.
As the weeks marched on and the rumblings of thunder from Putrajaya got louder and louder, we wondered if these leaders had aligned themselves with Mahathir and if we would soon see Najib leaving office like his predecessor, paving the way to what might be the most rousing Merdeka celebration since August 1957.
But it was not meant to be. The Last Days of July brought us the disintegration of our public institutions as Najib sucked in all power into the executive branch of government. He outplayed his enemies and built a fortress along with a shiny new set of lieutenants who would do battle with the nefarious Mahathir and the rest of the critics while he worked at fixing the 1MDB problem, thinking perhaps that if he does fix it, the rakyat will be grateful enough to let him continue as PM.
Many still wonder what exactly took place in the Last Days of July. Some bloggers and pundits have presented us with tales of plan after plan failing against a wall of money, rumours of a last ditch plan to unite some BN politicians with the opposition in a no-confidence vote, conjectures about a third force emerging, and so much more. And yet, we still do not know just how much we know.
But thanks to Mahathir’s latest blog entry, we have been told one thing – no one in the Cabinet is on our side anymore. According to the former PM, “Najib has made BN members of Parliament beholden to him by giving them lucrative posts in the government. Even those who had come to me complaining about Najib’s administration before, upon being given posts in his government, have now changed their stand. One of them, who claimed to have documentary evidence of Najib’s misconduct, now gladly supports him upon being made minister.”
