Why sacking Muhyiddin riskier than sacking Anwar Ibrahim

Shahrul Yusof
The Malaysian Insider

I remember it was in early September 1998, when TV3 broke the news about then prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad sacking his deputy, Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim.

It was during my summer holiday and I was back home with my family. Immediately after that I rang my friend Yazid in the UK and told him about the news.

Surprised he certainly was, and immediately conveyed the message to my other friends who were in England, and within a few days news reached everyone in the mosque there.

Six hours ago, I woke up at 6am in Manchester and grabbed my phone and to my surprise, Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin was out.

My Facebook timeline flashing with news after news about the sacking. Here in the UK, at the same time, Malaysian’s were already in chapter 4 of the chronological discussions, and it was less than an hour after Najib’s press statement.

News travel fast, rumours discussed every minute, the luxury of time and secrets are not with Najib. It was with Dr Mahathir.

When Anwar was sacked, it was not such a big scandal that Dr Mahathir could not handle. Apart from the currency issue that he blamed on Soros, he was allright.

He just built twin towers, KLIA and Putrajaya, which was nothing to few Malaysians but many believed and remember that period as being the glory days.

Whereas now Najib is at his low, scandal after scandal, evidence updated every hour. You don’t need Harakah, all you need is to type the name Najib on google search. Thousands of news reports are there waiting to be digested.

He has yet to come out with monuments of his own, both the MRT and the Tun Razak Exchange are still under construction.

The night Anwar was sacked, my dad said to me. “Look at it now my son, Umno is in trouble, maybe Dr Mahathir needs to step down”.

That was it. That was the only retaliation I heard from a Malaysian citizen I knew that night, before I went to sleep.

Two minutes ago I was reading the comment section on a Facebook posting by Najib about the sacking. More than 5,000 comments were made, 99.9% of it asking him to step down.

I cannot really compare the retaliation on the day after, because tomorrow is yet to come, and I cannot wait.

When you go into a fight, you bring your fighters with you. That’s what gangsters do.

Dr Mahathir has fighters behind him, many of them, and more than Najib’s men, who are artificial and pretentious, to be precise.

But what is scarier for Najib is his latest second man, the hopeful Datuk Seri Ahmad Zahid Hamidi. Do you remember him, the younger Zahid? The Zahid we knew in 1998.

I will always remember the TV news showing him being a staunch supporter of Anwar back then and taken into custody. He was known to be aligned with Anwar inside Umno yet he turned 180-degrees just a few months after Anwar was sacked and jailed.

He can either be a “true opportunist with no loyalty” or “Anwar’s secret agent in Putrajaya”. Both are disturbing probabilities for Najib.

As of now, seven hours after the sacking, I am still here reading the busy timeline on my Facebook.