SENILE & GREEDY OR NOT, MAHATHIR GETS WORSE: UNDER HIM, ‘M’ HAS BECOME A DIRTY WORD & ‘B’ FOR BANKRUPT OF HONESTY THE NEW BUZZWORDS TO DESCRIBE HIS ‘SHORT-SIGHTED’, ‘SUKA HATI’ RULE

Indeed the Pakatan Harapan government is drawing more and more flak everywhere, day by day.

Corporate corridors, social media and kopitiam corners are rife with shaking heads as people start asking serious questions of the dashed hopes and unfulfilled promises of the new government.

In essence there are three yardsticks that can be the measure of why citizens are becoming increasing weary of the Tun M ‘miracle’.

The nationwide smoking ban; the comic book ban and the use of Friday sermons to preach politically vested interests (or what I call ‘patronage politics’) – these three will best explain why the new leadership is not performing as best as it could have been with the head start given by the voters in GE14.

Policy making is short sighted.

Decision making is knee jerk.

Political patronage has now gone skywards.

There is a video making its round lately. Kishore Mahbubani, the Chunqiu Senior Fellow of the China Institute, and former Dean of Lee Kuan Yew Public Policy School shares why and how Singapore managed to join the ranks of developed nations using the ‘MPH’ formula.

Perhaps we can see now why we are failing given our re-minted Umno-Barisan Nasional political framework of the emerging new government of the day.

The nationwide smoking ban; the comic book ban and the use of Friday sermons to preach political vested interests – all these indicate that we are bankrupt of the ‘MPH’ formula that made Singapore so successful. 

 

We lacked ‘M’ – meritocracy; we abandoned the ‘P’ – pragmatism; and we certainly continue to be bankrupt of the ‘H’ – honesty. 

 

The question is how long more will our nation be able to weather the fast changing global arena with our symptoms as reflected in the nationwide smoking ban; the comic book ban and the use of Friday sermons to preach political vested interests. 

 

J. D. Lovrenciear