Why listen to Dr M? – Fikry Osman

Months after Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad retired in 2003, Malaysians gave overwhelming support to Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi and Barisan Nasional (BN) to govern the country. It was a majority that Dr M never got in his entire political career.

In 2008, Abdullah lost his supermajority after Dr M denounced him and his administration as a half-past-six government.

He’s doing it again. This time against Datuk Seri Najib Razak. Instead of being a statesman and a retired politician,, Dr M wants to continue being a kingmaker.

He should stop. Or we all should stop him.

Dr M now says Najib inherited a weak government from Pak Lah but who helped make it weak if not Dr M and his verbiage leading to the 2008 polls.

Every thing wrong in Malaysia can be traced back to him, from the distorted national car policy that has kept prices high to project M in flooding Sabah with illegals posing as citizens to bringing down his deputies when he was in power.

Now, Dr M only seems interested in installing his son as the Kedah Mentri Besar and patching up his tattered legacy by suggesting Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim could have had a hand in Project M.

It is always someone else’s fault and not his. For Dr M, its only the credit and adulation that he wants to receive but not the brickbats.

Yes, he did well with the hardware but not the software. Najib still has to use ministers from Dr M’s era because the young talent in Umno is useless or not favoured by him, like Khairy Jamaluddin.

We should stop listening to this man. After all, we had to listen to him for 22 years, through two Umnos that couldn’t send us a better leader.

We Malaysians are now quite capable of assessing Najib or Anwar and don’t need a tutorial from him to select our next leadership.

It is up to 13.3 million voters to decide who will lead the country, not Dr M. So let’s stop listening to him.

* Fikry Osman reads The Malaysian Insider.