The Key Difference Between Mahathir And Najib Cronyism Explained In Tweets

(MD) – As social media has been flooding with opinion postings related to the upcoming 14th General Election (GE14), in a Twitter thread recently, one user jumped on the bandwagon to share her two cents on why people should choose wisely between the lesser of two evils.

The user with the Twitter handle @crazytvlady reiterated to her followers on April 14 of what was relayed to her recently by a friend who will be confidently voting for Barisan Nasional (BN) on May 9.

According to the user, her friend shared that Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s economic policies are a far cry from BN Chairman Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak’s – and though cronyism is inevitable even in the latter’s time, it is prominent as the former’s model.

“The problem with Mahathir’s model is this: You inevitably become a slave to your proxies, crony businessmen who’ll want more overpriced projects… so economic policy is determined by them.

“This is UMNO we’re talking about. So I’m quite sure many projects are still awarded to cronies. That’s just how UMNO (and Malay politics) work. But not as bad as before for sure. Or you’ll be hearing a lot more complaints about cronyism and bailouts from Pakatan.”

She explained that even if Najib was allegedly misappropriating 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) funds, he was not indebted to cronies, while highlighting the key difference between Mahathir cronyism and Najib cronyism is that the people are left burdened in the end.

“Take Mahathir’s tolls — we are the ones who directly have to pay for that. His LRT, monorail — we suffer the inconvenience of small, poorly connected trains. Proton — we’ve to pay much higher prices for foreign cars and cars in general.

“Giving the satellite TV monopoly to Astro— we suffer for the lack of competition… expensive and shitty content,” she said, and pointed out that 1MDB only left the government with a net loss of RM1mil till today – which is pale in comparison to making the people fork out their own money.

As for the Goods and Services Tax (GST) that is frequently associated with the rising cost of living, she said although there is a small spike, most of it is mainly perception as the prices of goods are in accordance to the market.

In foreseeing this, she explained, the government had designed BR1M – which comes hand in hand with GST, aside removing fuel subsidies and exempting prices of goods, to lessen the people’s burden.

However, she made a point that prices of goods had also increased due to the shortage of foreign workers after the Opposition pact had used their scaremongering tactics in the last election, in which the government took action to clamp down the hiring of foreign workers.

“That means lower production in farms etc. which causes lower supply. And of course when there’s lower supply, the prices will go up,” but nevertheless, personal income tax has been reduced, she said.

In commenting further on the accusations Dr Mahathir had made that Malaysia is being conquered by China with new investors coming into the country, she deemed it nonsense as via Najib’s New Economic Model (NEM) is more needs-based instead of race-based.

“It’s mind boggling that the non-Malays are even thinking of voting for Mahathir when he was the one who hammered in the idea of Ketuanan Melayu. Now he said he never believed in it.

“The non-Malays are thinking that a change of government will give them equality but equality will never happen unless Malays and Chinese reach economic equality and we have to work towards that. The eternal question is can we transcend race? I think not.”

She ended by revealing that her friend who shared these sentiments is an urban liberal Chinese who was raised to be anti-Mahathir, however is now heartbroken that his parents will be voting for the racist man who “will say anything to stay in power.”