Ariff: If PM gets personal, a lot that Dr M can unleash

Unlike Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak, former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has no personal skeletons in the closet.

KUALA LUMPUR: Raub MP Mohd Ariff Sabri Abdul Aziz wonders whether the mamak shop issue was the only thing that Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak can come up with to recover his credibility and popularity in the wake of a series of scandals. “Najib’s reversal on the mamak shops has the people thanking him. Perhaps they are thinking, “lucky we have Najib’.”

Hello! Hello! reminds Ariff . “The people haven’t forgotten 1MDB, Felda Global Ventures (FGV), MaraGate, TabungHajiGate, Sime Darby, Felcra and scandals yet to come.”

Ariff wants to remind Najib that unlike him, former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad does not have personal skeletons in the closet. “So, no point getting personal and offensive with Mahathir,” he said.

“If Najib wants to get personal with Mahathir, what has he got? We have never heard that the former Prime Minister had scandals with women or was involved in any killing. Has anyone accused Mahathir’s wife of this and that?”

Najib’s wife, he reminded was the first for a Prime Minister who was disliked by the people. “Najib buat tak tahu. He pretends not to know, putting on a sardine face. As a former Umno Minister has said, ‘it seems that the party no longer knows what shame is’.”

He warned that if Najib gets personal and offensive with Mahathir “through his people”, he won’t know what he was getting into. “Mahathir has a lot on him that he can unleash.”

“We haven’t yet calculated the cost of the MRT,” said Ariff . “MRT was supposed to have been carried out by the Ministry of Finance (MoF) owned Pembinaan PFI where the financing was supposed to have been done by the private sector. But it seems that this government likes to pay out first after giving out the project.”

Every advance, he charged, was another way of pocketing something out of the payment. “Najib won’t be able to cover up this scandal too. It has become like the elephant’s carcass too. No leaf was big enough to cover it.”

Revisiting the mamak shop issue, Ariff feels that it was a cheap trick at best for Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Shahidan Kassim and Najib to play the bad cop, good cop routine a la Laurel and Hardy Malaysia. “Najib must be hailed as Bapa Nasi Kandar 24 Jam.”

After Shahidan had announced that mamak shops could not stay open 24/7, he noted, Najib quickly came in and reversed the decision. “Naturally, everybody said, ini macam kalu machaa . . . Najib is the best.”

All these, he added, was cheap political acting on the part of Najib and Shahidan. “Why not look elsewhere for the real sources of social problems?” he asked. “If mamak shops don’t operate 24/7 where would the shift workers go? The Malay shops would have long closed.”