MAHATHIR BRIBED UMNO MEMBERS TO JOIN PRIBUMI

The Third Force

An idle mind is the devil’s workshop, they say. In the case of Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, the game has always been poker. The Machiavellian-turned-illusionist keeps tossing very powerful cards with big numbers onto the table. Only the devil can tell you the cards are fake, that the numbers are from his mind, sealed in lies.

Last Tuesday, the 10th of May 2017, the former premier got Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia (PPBM) to announce that Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin had topped the charts in a discovery into “What Malaysians want?” The ‘results’, designed to trigger infighting in UMNO, posed major ‘upsets’ when it was revealed that Dato’ Seri Hishammuddin Hussein had surpassed Dato’ Seri Najib Tun Razak by two notches when it came to the people’s choice of “who should be Prime Minister.”

But that’s not all.

In what seemed a desperate attempt by Mahathir to pit Hishammuddin against current deputy premier Dato’ Seri Dr. Ahmad Zahid Hamidi, the ‘survey’ appeared tuned to the idea that people preferred just about anyone other than Najib, even if it were the Pope. That may have been believable had it not been for an itsy-bitsy, tiny-winey detail – the total respondents numbered 150, and not 3,000, as claimed by the party.

Yes, you read right.

Not only did PPBM multiply the actual number of respondents by two and add a zero behind, the party’s chairman and de facto chief – Mahathir himself – forgot to make public the RM500 he instructed his henchmen to pay some 50 ‘respondents’. And while the remaining 100 ‘respondents’ were existing PPBM members, and in some cases, Chinese DAP members, over a thousand others were simply paid between RM2,000 to RM 10,000 (depending on who they were) to desert UMNO and join PPBM.

Surprised? Well, there is more.

The desertions were triggered in stages by a shadow movement within UMNO, one which Mahathir established in 2015 and is currently nurturing to sabotage the ruling coalition. The movement, led by a high-profile Dato’ and assisted by several MCA leaders and a former DAP member, receives funding from Mahathir (and to some extent, the DAP) and is determined to break the ruling coalition’s media edifice through acts of espionage.

And that begs the question, why? Why is Mahathir so determined to oust Najib, to the point that he’d fund a group to sabotage UMNO from within? Has it anything to do with the trending buzz, that he wants his son to become the next Prime Minister of Malaysia? Or is it simply because Najib is an aristocrat?

Now, if I were to say the latter, many would probably go, “yeah, there goes The Third Force (or, as Hussein Hamid calls me, The Turd Farce) again.” And believe me, even leaders from government have been tiptoeing around my articles, puzzled as to how one could possibly know stuff even intelligence officers are scrambling to uncover. But that’s just my job – to bring you guys the truth no matter the perception. How I do it is another story, though I did sign some pacts with the devil to be able to do so.

And that is partly how I’m aware of a misunderstanding that ensued between Mahathir’s late father and a group of aristocrats in the late thirties. Then a young lad, the somewhat impressionable and naive Mahathir was so badly scarred, he swore eternal vendetta against the noble class, pledging to “burn the bridge that connects the people with the Palace” in his later years. Those aren’t my words, but the words of the country’s first Prime Minister, the late Tunku Abdul Rahman.

Early in the seventies, the Tunku confided in a historian-turned-writer that Mahathir’s “biggest mission is to have a non-aristocrat lead government before he dies.” And that is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. You may doubt me on that note, but you cannot deny the resolve and grit with which Mahathir spent a part of his 22 years in office castrating the Monarchical institution.

You can’t, simply because it’s the truth.

And that truth is the reason Najib’s leadership was demonised and his name, blackened. In a bid to depose him, Mahathir tried every trick in the book, including plotting the former’s arrest on trumped-up charges. When the July 2015 plot failed, the former premier teamed up with a group of oppositionists to demand Najib’s unequivocal removal through a highly-politicised Citizen’s Declaration.

Now, the Declaration may have been successful had it not been for one thing – it was forged. On the 26th of May 2016, barely two months into a signature-collection drive launched to invigorate the anti-Najib campaign, a young computer programmer made public some RM5,000 he was promised for some data, said to contain almost a million names that were said to have appeared in copies of the Declaration.

While I cannot verify if a match exists between the names on those copies and those from the programmer’s spreadsheet, I am sure that the copies were channeled to the leader of the shadow movement while it still contained 862 names. I say that with conviction, because I myself chanced upon a copy, though that copy was later handed over to a Dato’ who now claims he has ‘misplaced’ it.

Still, notwithstanding the Dato’ or the copies, one thing remains clear – Mahathir failed to produce the signatures in his 16th of September 2016 audience with the Yang di-Pertuan Agong. And that may have been the biggest letdown yet to the rakyat, even bigger than the 16th of September 2008 takeover bid by Pakatan Rakyat that never materialised.

Not only did Anwar waste our time, so did Mahathir, who took the His Majesty the Agong for a fool. All the hype, all the angst, all the rancor and all the drama – and yet, he was lying to us all the while. So how can anyone trust PPBM, a party run by this charlatan of a Machiavellian who now works with Anwar to run the government down?

Tell me, people, how can you believe anything Mahathir says?