The Equaliser now exiting with tail between his legs?

Umar Mukhtar

Earlier in the year, as some opposition MPs continued with their attempts to arouse our suspicions that something irregular had been going on with a government-owned company, it was the usual “he said, she said” kind of stuff. Young cikus loving to hog the limelight, what the heck!

Then suddenly entered The Equaliser, as his fans who hero-worship him refer to him, the 90-year-old ex-prime minister of 22 years, Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, striding into the controversy. The Equaliser was a fictional Eighties TV hero character that helped the weak and the underdogs in settling disputes  with powerful ones by levelling the playing field with his prowess.

Mahathir had disapproved of prime minister Najib Razak’s leadership for a while already but he was silent on the 1MDB matter. So what was obvious was that he already wanted Najib to resign even without the 1MDB matter. The 1MDB controversy was not his reason for hating Najib.

It was something else. We were told through the grapevine of various things ranging from Najib’s rejection of millions of ringgit requested by Mahathir to be dumped into Proton which is Mahathir’s baby, Najib’s refusal to build the crooked bridge to Singapore, even Najib’s refusal to back Mahathir to collect on promises of equity in huge public-listed companies which had benefited from the Barisan Nasional government’s kind patronage during Mahathir’s years as PM. Among many others, too boring to mention.

They could be true, they could be false, God knows! Either way, they don’t surprise me, I have seen worse things in Mahathir’s twenty-two years as PM. Water under the bridge. The common thing that run through the stories was that the upstart Najib refused to do Mahathir’s bidding. I don’t know why but I can venture a guess that it is a bit of an odd expectation by Mahathir of a serving prime minister. But who knows what transpired, or was promised between the two of them. I didn’t care. And I was helpless, anyway.

What made me sit up was Mahathir taking over Tony Pua’s and Rafizi Ramli’s cause about 1MDB’s shenanigans. Enter The Equaliser, the game-changer! He even went so far as to indicate the amount of RM42 billion borrowed by 1MDB was missing. That’s a lot of money, humongous by any measure. I have to take notice, as I don’t want my children paying for them later. I began to read the Sarawak Report and The Edge, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and the New York Times.

Why these and not TV3, RTM, the New Straits Times and Utusan Malaysia? Let’s not go there, I don’t need to answer that, right? Anyway, I did notice that it seems so difficult to determine the truth, even till now. My mistake was that I was expecting The Equaliser to show us the smoking gun that will pin down the culprits. Otherwise, the experienced and wily old man would not have been so bullish to join in the fray.

Then it came out that the muckrakers were obtaining information illegally and could not ascertain the truth. Tong, Tony Pua, Rafizi, etc., are now quiet as mice. Don’t tell me these brave souls turned embarrassed scary-cats as soon as Najib went on the offensive. Honestly, I do not know what to make of all the stuff I read and the goings-on. I will just wait for The Equaliser and the smoking gun. Jeng! Jeng! Jeng!

Suddenly, he came out with the statement that he hasn’t got any proof for his allegations. Oh my God! Mahathir putting the country through all this pain, and he hasn’t got proof? Oh my God, is this the man who ran the country for twenty-two years? No wonder we are in the shit-house! What happened to his wiliness? Aha, maybe he still is, at 90 years of age, and he is hiding the smoking gun between his legs, which fits because he got big balls, until the very last minute like the good old Hindustani movie hero!

So, Najib, beware! As for me, I am now almost ambivalent about the whole mess but I still may vote for the headless chicken of an opposition simply because I feel that the BN government doesn’t really care about the future of my children. Neither does the opposition actually, from the looks of bald hills on Penang Island. But my late father was an opposition MP and he used to tell me to always vote with significance. I suppose right now that means the opposition. But it can change.

Oh, by the way, in spite of who is right and who is wrong, I would still love to feed Jho Lo’s balls to the pigs. Somehow I know that that would be the right thing to do. US$300 million brokerage fee to sell US$3 billion of sovereign-backed bonds? You don’t need to attend the Wharton Business School to know that Malaysia and Somalia are separate countries. What stupidity! Or was it really stupidity? And I will skip the circus that is coming to town that has muted clowns and court jesters on steroids.