NO WAY! IT’S CONSTITUTIONALLY ILLEGAL!
Najib miscalculates with his guessing game
| March 6, 201
Can it be said that Prime Minister
Najib Tun Razak plans to delay the dissolution of Parliament, thus effectively
delaying holding the 13th general election?
COMMENT
Is
there a plan to delay the general election? All things certainly seem to point
to that direction.
The dateline is approaching near and
Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak is desperate as he knows that the rakyat is
waiting anxiously for the polls to be held.
Despite his rhetoric that “everyone
has gone back to Barisan Nasional”, he has not displayed any sense of urgency
in holding the polls at all.
Instead, he has told the rakyat “to
keep on guessing” and people are guessing that it looks like he wants to delay
calling for the general election.
His game in polls-delaying can
definitely be read by the more intelligent among us.
As this coming April 28 is the date
of the automatic dissolution of Parliament, the 13th general election should be
held within 60 days as permitted under the Federal Constitution.
Holding the polls after April 28 is,
however, not ideal because once Parliament is dissolved, BN is only a caretaker
government.
Investors will lose confidence and
this has nothing to do with Pakatan Rakyat.
As it is now, due to the crisis in
Lahad Datu-Semporna in Sabah, it will be impossible to hold the general
election this month, meaning that Najib has nearly used up the full tenure by
hanging on to the coat-tails of former prime minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi’s
mandate.
However, this columnist is very
confident that Malaysia’s armed forces is well-equipped and intelligent enough
to put an end to the crisis happening in the east coast of Sabah and therefore
Malaysians will be able to go to the polls in April.
The courage and fortitude of our
armed forces should be commended and we should pray that there should be no
more loss of lives.
Najib, too, should make a beeline to
go to Ground Zero on a regular basis to assess the situation as he is the prime
minister.
The polling date
Of course, this is being long-winded
but a time-frame ought to be spelt out clearly for him to hold the general
election and here in FMT, this columnist is telling him that he should do it
this way:
1. March 28: dissolve Parliament,
and
2. April 21: polling for the 13th
general election.
After all, the prime minister is
still a public servant and should listen to the voice of the people.
This is so that he knows what the
rakyat expects of him. He has said that he wants to listen to the pulse of the
nation and so this is it.
He must not forget that it was he
who had made the statement that “the era the government knows best is over”.
Therefore this write-up serves to remind him of this past statement of his.
There should be no more polls delay
as many political analysts since early last year have predicted that BN will
win the 13th general election, with some saying that regaining the two-thirds
parliamentary majority is not impossible.
With such favourable prognosis, it
certainly makes one wonder why the general election has yet to be called as the
Malays and Indians have been widely acclaimed by BN leaders to be on BN’s side
now.
A local English daily in its report
on March 4 had two stories under these titles: “40 former members of PAS, PKR
join Umno” and “121 fed-up Selangor residents join MIC”.
Of course, people leaving BN to join
Pakatan will never be reported in the mainstream media.
“The prime minister talks big but it
is all a stage show. Otherwise, why has the polls been delayed since April
2011? I recall that there was previous talk that the 13th general election
would be held simultaneously with the Sarawak state election held at that time
but it all came to nothing thus effectively making Najib out to be a paper man
talking paper words,” said Nizar Jamaluddin of PAS, the state assemblyman for
Pasir Panjang in Perak.
This only goes to show that the
Chinese proverb is very true: “If one takes a long time in doing something, it
means that he will not be doing it.”
Currently the Lahad Datu-Semporna
problem is proving to be a worry to all Malaysians, especially Sabahans.
Fancy slogans
Therefore Najib has miscalculated
his political move.
He had planned to delay the polls to
annoy and tire Pakatan so that Pakatan leaders will lose focus, but the long
delay has resulted in this sudden crisis cropping up and now the polls will be
further delayed, thus giving him a bad impression all round.
Where is the effectiveness of his
GTP (Government Transformation Programme) in all this?
Najib should now wake up fast and
try to redeem himself by striving to be the image that he has created for
himself. This is year 2013 and not the 1960s or 1970s and he must realise that
he cannot dupe the citizens with fancy slogans and multiple abbreviations.
Said a political analyst who is a
friend of this columnist, “In many instances, Najib applies the ‘Blue Ocean
Strategy’ instead of Sun Tzu’s ‘Art Of War’ principles. He fails to suit the
strategy to the situation thus displaying his lack of sharpness in political
warfare as well as military warfare.”
Are most Malaysians intelligent
enough to read his game? Or only a minority can see through his ploy?
Will it be too late by the time the
13th general election is held? The year of the Water Snake seems to be ominous
and this is only early March.
Selena Tay is a DAP member and a FMT
columnist.
