Dr M as PM: Back to square one after 30 years

OPINION

Dr M as PM: Back to square one after 30 years

By

 Ti Lian Ker

 

Last Updated 9th January, 2018, 5:27 PM

Pakatan Harapan is simply not serious about the change they have been promoting and promising the people

COMMENT

The announcement that Dr Mahathir Mohamad is Pakatan Harapan’s anointed Prime Minister and Anwar Ibrahim will be in waiting shows that the nation has been taken for a ride by both Anwar and Mahathir.

We are back to square one after 30 years. We have gone one full circle. Thirty years ago, Anwar insisted that Mahathir must go or the nation will go bankrupt or collapse.

Mahathir was said to be the father of financial scandals and manipulations to enriched his children and cronies. The rakyat believed him and a reformasi movement was formed leading to a series of street protests pitting the street protesters and the police against each other on a massive scale put the country in a limbo.

Mahathir insisted that the nation cannot have someone like Anwar to be the prime minister. He was said to have serious moral issues and was accused of preying on his driver, his adopted brother, his associates for homosexual acts.

The government institutions, the party (both Umno/BN) and a majority of the people believed Mahathir. They all continued to back him up in his removal of Anwar as the deputy prime minister.

The nation was torn apart right in the middle. The government, the politicians and the people took position for and against their preferred leader.

The nation went from being stable, harmonious and united to be in a turbulence, topsy-turvy and divided right in the middle.

Many resources were wasted, the national progress was in a standstill and the struggle for power and control has been going on continuously ever since.

Many alignments and realignments were made involving two extremely contradictory opposite parties, ie PAS and DAP banding together and leaving each other again and again.

After three decades of taking the nation on a political roller-coaster ride causing serious trauma and irreparable damage to our national system, institutions and a confused generation, these two master politicians are now back to square one albeit one to be the the prime minister and the other prime minister-in-waiting.

Basically their supporters and sympathisers have been cheated. These two men are not statesmen who has the nation in their hearts and mind. These two leaders of which the people have been living under their shadows and ambitions are merely pawns in their bigger game of power and personal agenda.

Now we are basically telling the future generations not to trust our leaders. What they say or what they do; what they stand for and the principles they espoused and their promises and undertakings are just a political game.

The moral of the story is that both Mahathir and Anwar cannot be trusted. The truth is that both of them have resorted to “lies or semi-truths” to influence, convince and manipulate our emotions.

When Pakatan Harapan decides to name them their future prime minister and PM-in-waiting, the logical and only conclusion is that despite all the brouhaha about moralities, political decencies, cronies and such, Pakatan is not serious about the change they have been promoting and promising the people.

Despite all that’s said and done, for this two same old same old men, it is just politics as usual!

Ti Lian Ker is MCA spokesman and the party’s religious harmony bureau chairman