GST D-DATE: Will it be April Fool for Najib & BN?

Though there are still two weeks to go before April 1, we might as well follow the lead of Malaysia’s clownishly criminal ever-ruling regime and celebrate Hari April Fool in advance.

Or indeed every day, in light of the fact that the members, cronies and sycophants of Umno/BN have been making very bad jokes at the expense of the Malaysian people day in, day out for decades.

And now that less and less people are seeing the funny side of this rank regime’s pernicious pranks, it seems hell-bent on laughing in Malaysians’ faces more insultingly than ever.

As evidenced, for example, by its timing of the launch of its goods and services tax (GST) for this April Fools’ Day, as if to make a point of what a jolly jape it is to make every Malaysian pay compensation for the countless billions stolen from the nation’s coffers by Umno/BN.

And of course it’s not just the timing that makes the GST such a joke, but also the amazing jumble of goods and services that are zero-rated or exempted altogether in favour of special-interest groups related to or supportive of the regime.

But the GST, or, in other words, the graft and stealing tax, is far from the only piece of funny business this ludicrous regime is entertaining Malaysians and the rest of the world with in the lead-up to this April Fools’ Day.

In fact the list of current Umno/BN comedy routines is almost endless in both number and duration. One of the longest-running, for example, is what could, as long as we’re so close to 1 April, be appropriately called Altantuya Fools’ Day or more accurately eight years of days, a production so ridiculous it would have had us all dying laughing by now if it wasn’t so tragic.

Then, in much the same vein, there’s the latest of a whole series of Anwar Fools’ Days, complete with a road-show featuring rib- or rather nipple-tickling public appearances by one of Umno/BN’s troupe of performing legal jesters, Muhammad Shafee Abdullah, under the auspices of the laughably useless and increasingly youthless Youth and Sports Minister, Khairy Jamaluddin.

But the Shafee/Khairy show, as hilarious or even hilarious as it may have been, wasn’t nearly such a hoot as the more recent Anwar Ibrahim-related farce enacted for a global audience by the Umno/BN cyber-comedians who got sprung by the White House trying to fake public opposition to a John Malott-inspired pro-Anwar petition to the US president.

The very same president, of course, who must have been far from amused at Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak’s recent attempts to use him as a straight-man in his comical attempt to fool the Malaysian audience that his so-called ‘golfing diplomacy’ in Hawaii took precedence over the floods back home.

Speaking of Najib, the man who has arguably done more to caricature himself as the very personification of a crooked politician and make Malaysia an international laughing-stock than anybody but the supreme sultan of sarcastic self-satire, Dr Mahathir, he’s always good for a droll one-liner.

Unintentionally droll, unfortunately, as he clearly has not a shred of wit or the sense of humour.

Dead-pan comedy classics

Though somehow that makes him all the funnier when he comes up with such dead-pan comedy classics as ‘making Malaysia the world’s best democracy’, ‘zero tolerance of corruption’, ‘kangkung economics’ and ‘RM1 chickens’, or more contemporary zingers like ‘inheritance’ in explanation of his wealth and "rubbish" in response to calls from Malaysiakini for his comments on the Altantuya case.

Of course his consort, Rosmah Mansor, is always good for a belly laugh too, as Malaysia’s iconic cartoonist Zunar never tires of observing. Rosmah’s claim that she was able to afford obscenely expensive products because she had “saved up since small” was almost enough to turn April Fools’ into April Jewels Day.

And her more recent quip that the forthcoming joke GST might save her some of the RM1,200 she pays for a home-delivered hair dye and snip surely cemented her status as the world’s funniest First Lady.

But as great a giggle as Najib and Rosmah may be, they’ve got some pretty hot competition in the comedy department from a whole gaggle of up-and-coming and supporting acts.

Like the whole cast of relatives, friends and cronies in the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) show, from alleged ‘financier’ Jho Low (in photo), who can’t see why anyone would think it’s funny as in strange that he or his buddy, Rosmah’s son and Najib’s stepson Riza Aziz, can afford high-end New York real estate, to the members of the Umno/BN regime cabinet, who have collectively given 1MDB a clean bill of health.

Surely Najib is joking, too, in fact experiencing a personal April Fools’ Day, in trying to convince himself that his staging of an ‘investigation’ of his ridiculous 1MDB, by a ‘special taskforce’ comprising his compromised attorney-general, Keystone-Kops-style police force and utterly useless Malaysian Anti-corruption Commission (MACC) will placate the Malaysian public, let alone foreign governments and financial regulators.

Certainly there’s no sign that such transparently contrived antics are fooling former prime minister Mahathir, who, let’s face it, should recogniae a massive financial fraud when he sees one, having presided over and escaped liability for literally countless such scams during his own 22 years in office.

But if Najib and his gang’s gags as in jokes aren’t going over too well these days, at least, thanks to Home Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi, himself something of a joke as a result of a letter he wrote to the FBI in support of an allegedly criminal Malaysian gambling identity, Umno/BN’s long-standing gag as in silencer on the mainstream media remains firmly in place.

Thus the regime continues to keep as many Malaysians as possible living in some kind of permanent April Fools’ Day, and as both witlessly amused and unwittingly abused as ever, by such nonsense as Najib’s recent declaration that “I cannot imagine Malaysia without Umno, especially Malays and Muslims.”

“The answer will make Malays destitutes in their own country,” he went on and on at the close of the Perak Umno convention and Umno branches conference 2015 in Ipoh, before concluding by urging the practice of “no longer rigid politics but new politics.”

But lest his listeners imagine he meant the end of Umno/BN corruption or ‘money politics’, he immediately retracted this statement with the words “but this does not mean the old politics cannot be practiced... some politics of development, needed by the people, is the core to the old politics that still needs to be implemented by us.”

In other words, for Najib and his Umnoputras, the vast majority of other Malaysians of every race, creed and condition are just a bunch of April Fools with no choice but to blindly obey regime rules and cough-up the cash for which Umno/BN drools. - M'kini