Polling on Saturday, March 30?

Because of the one-week school holiday in March, the polls will most certainly be held during this time, and the all-defining date that pops up is Saturday, March 30.

COMMENT

A number of regular readers of this columnist’s articles have requested for piece on the polls date, so this issue will be tackled here. But first of all, this columnist wishes to say that Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak has just lost a brilliant opportunity to deal Pakatan Rakyat a fatal blow by dissolving Parliament on Jan 14 (just after the KL112 event) for early February polls, which will certainly catch Pakatan by surprise as its leaders are expecting the general election to be held only in March.

It is starting to get uncanny the way Najib seems to delay dissolving Parliament each time he has the advantage. After all, he had claimed credit for the smooth-running of the KL112 event on Jan 12 due to the Peaceful Assembly Act which was initiated by him and which was passed in Parliament in November 2011.

Najib has only himself to blame now. His enemies are closing in and time is running out. And it is not the tag-team of Deepak Jaikishan-Musa Hassan nor opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim who did him in but it is the calendar that has cornered him. More on this later.

This time Najib is hard-pressed. He has run out of dates to maneuver. This same time last year he was still going on strong and had ample time to hold the polls but he had faltered and fumbled and lo and behold, we are in 2013!

A look at the past year showed that under his tenure a lot of piecemeal small cash handouts were, well, handed out. And there was also talk that next year the RM500 cash aid (for households earning below RM3,000) may even be upgraded to RM1,000.

“This is certainly an obvious attempt to fish for votes,” remarked PAS Kota Raja MP, Dr Siti Mariah Mahmud.

As of now, tremendous limelight and huge publicity will be given to the handing out of book vouchers for the students and the RM500 cash aid to households. You can expect to be bombarded with scenes of joyous recipients showing the 1Malaysia sign on your television screens from now till polling day.

In other countries where the government gives out unemployment cash aid to the citizens, there is not even an iota of publicity but here in Malaysia there is always a publicity blitz whenever the government helps the rakyat.

‘I love PM’

Never before under the tenureship of the previous Malaysian Prime Ministers do you see people holding up placards proclaiming ‘I love PM’ but this placard is now the norm. Does this then show that the current PM loves to be in the limelight looking like a celebrity? Respect for the nation’s leaders should be encouraged but it should not go overboard.

Najib’s various initiatives to improve the well-being of the citizens have so far failed to address the main problem and that is the mismanagement of the nation’s economy due to corruption and cronyism that is eating at the root of the economic system and which will implode either sooner or later.

Everything he does is hot on hype and only ad-hoc but surrounded by lots of publicity to give the rakyat some mind-numbing feel-good factor. One can now expect massive and intensive propaganda and political advertorials to take up a substantial amount of media time and space to capture the hearts and influence the minds of the citizens in the run-up to the election campaign and continue till voting day itself.

Even the 8pm daily news slot has been turned into a campaign slot by BN to show how the BN federal government have helped the rakyat. The control of mainstream media will enable Najib to build up a cult-following. If everyone falls under the spell of BN’s propaganda, then it will not be long before we become a nation of zombies. Therefore we must be awake in order to speak up and speak out.

Back to the date of the 13th General Election. January and February are definitely out. As mentioned in a previous article, the earliest available date is March 9 and because there is a one-week school holiday in March (from March 23 to 31), therefore the polls will most certainly be held during this time and the all-defining date is Saturday, March 30.

Parliament would most likely be dissolved on Saturday, March 2.

Going into the month of April will be unthinkable for Najib as there is no school holiday in April but much more than that it is because he would have overstayed on Abdullah Ahmad Badawi’s tenure which the latter had obtained on March 8, five years ago. If polls are in April, it will show to the world that Najib is truly afraid of holding the general election. Therefore April is no-go.

Thus Najib has been done in by the ubiquitous calendar. Nothing more, nothing less, nothing else. This columnist dares to say that Saturday, March 30 is the certain and final date as it is already stretching it to the last of the last.

Selena Tay is a DAP member and a FMT columnist