IT’S A PITY THAT TOMMY THOMAS MAY NOT BE UP TO THE CHALLENGE
Umar Mukhtar
It was asserted loudly that we need Tommy Thomas to be the new Attorney-General, because of his extreme prowess in corporate law in order for him to handle for us the complicated 1MDB cases.
Since it was about the only reason that I voted for Pakatan Harapan, to hope that the 1MDB mystery see some light, I welcomed Tommy as the new Chief Prosecutor to go along with the appointment of a new Prime Minister.
Suddenly now he tells us that he is too busy to prosecute ex-PM Najib Razak, who has gotten himself a battery of top local and international lawyers. So instead Tommy got my cool law school professor, Sulaiman Abdullah to do his bidding for him.
Even with that abdication, he is still too busy it seemed to do what he was hired for! He got former Justice Sri Ram to handle the 1MDB cases instead. This is after he had gotten an admiralty legal specialist to handle the Equanimity seizure and prospective sale since he knows nothing about ships.
Luckily all three of them will do their tasks pro bono; as their national service to the nation. Tommy, who is busy with other things and as a head-hunter to boot, will keep his full salary though.
He is left with such a meagre free time to be an apologist for the regime, to dispense profound nuggets of wisdom like “manifestoes are insignificant” in public forums, as if we are born yesterday.
I thought the AG Chambers are full of talented young men and women ready to pull all-nighters. Oh, maybe they are majority of a certain disposition pre-determined as dumb. And since geniuses work alone, Tommy is indeed over-worked.
Now I miss AGs like Abu Talib who walked silently but got his job done without outsourcing. Perhaps he was apt at using Solicitors-General and others to help him out. That must have not been a sign of weakness to the secure adults who has filled the office previously.
Tommy’s testimonials of his appointees were glowing, as if the smarter they are, the smarter he must be for them to be willing to work under him. He forgot that by then he was only an administrator, never a mechanic who gets his hands dirty.
It does seem that we got ourselves a brilliant striker but he prefers to be benched, to watch the whole game from the outside and advise. I guess we can still boast to the world that we have a Ronaldo but we benched him!
Maybe it’s the national language briefings to the public that’s too tough for him. Strange, Bahasa Malaysia is easy if you don’t quit so fast. And he is no quitter, right, Canada?
I still have faith in Tommy Thomas to do the job he was hired for. That’s because I know it’s just a ploy. You know, football teams always claim that their star is sick, only to spring him to unsuspecting opponents at the last minute!
What if he fails? If he fails, I’ll get a t-shirt with his face and name emblazoned across it in big letters, cross out the alphabets ‘omm’ and replace them with ‘err’ with a red marker, and resign myself to the fact that we got ourselves a clown to do a man’s job.
