Lost and going downhill? - Selena Tay

If not for any other reason, BN should be rejected due to its election date game. 

Again there are rumours that Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak may dissolve Parliament this month, to be precise on June 22, in order for the 13th general election to be held in July.

There are several reasons why he may want to hold the polls next month:

• Before he gets any bad news from Europe;

• Before the Malaysian economy takes a downturn due to the global economic climate;

• Before anymore financial scandals are revealed by the Auditor-General’s Report to be presented at the next Parliament sitting; and

• To consolidate his position before the hostile internal forces in Barisan Nasional closes in on him.

Although the dirty voter rolls favour BN, Penang and Selangor can still choose not to dissolve their respective State Legislative Assemblies and so even if he wins at federal level, these two states are still out of his grasp.

And automatically this means that his days as Umno president and prime minister are numbered. Will the fate that befell the fifth prime minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, also befall Najib?

July is also not the right time for him to hold the polls as his support from the rakyat is not encouraging. The rakyat have also lost the feel-good factor from the RM500 aid and therefore will he dole out another round of the same?

No, he does not know what to do now as he is being besieged from all sides and therefore the nation is at a standstill. And to top it off, Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin piles on the pressure by saying that the 13th general election is a “do-or-die battle” for BN.

If not for any other reason, then BN should be rejected due to this election date game.

The Chinese view the prime minister as not a capable person for not being able to do such a simple thing as dissolving Parliament. Thus the longer he holds off the polls, the more the Chinese will view him as being not capable and the more Chinese votes he will lose as many are already losing confidence in him due to his foot-dragging over the polls date.

Allocations (read: money) have again also been disbursed to the BN parliamentarians in order for them to do their constituency work. The amount that each BN MP will be getting is RM1.5 million per person.
This shows that BN is going all out in its final push to secure the votes at all cost.

Widening budget deficit

In the current Parliament sitting, the BN federal government has tabled an additional Supplementary Supply Bill 2012 amounting to nearly RM14 billion. In layman’s terms, the government is requesting for this sum of money to be used.

A point of interest to note is that out of this gigantic amount, a sum of RM360 million is to be allocated to the Election Commission (EC) for its use to prepare for the 13th general election.

This additional funds requested by the government will put a further strain on the nation’s budget deficit which currently stands at RM503.2 billion and translates close to 55% of the GDP (Gross Domestic Product).

The coming cash handouts to be tabled in Budget 2013 will continue to be BN’s strategy to woo the voters if the polls are not held next month.

Using cash to woo the voters is a very low-class third world strategy to garner votes because it shows that the government is lacking in clear-cut constructive policies in order to appeal to the voters’ intellect. And if we vote BN, it shows that we are also lacking in intellect.

This lack of brilliant and innovative policies to improve the economic state of the nation will only serve to delay the inevitable as the economy gets worse and the rakyat gets dumb-downed progressively.

Whether this will enable Malaysia to emulate the Grecian model is anyone’s guess. Suffice to say that an implosion is bound to occur sooner or later.

Continuous substantial increase in emoluments to the top-ranked civil servants (as what had happened in Greece) will also deplete the nation’s coffers but of course the government of the day is bent on securing its “fixed deposit vote bank” at all costs.

As the voters continue to fall into the trap of voting in the BN government in exchange for a few scraps (read RM500) once or twice a year, the vicious cycle continues and that is why Malaysia has one of the longest-serving incumbent governments in the world.

Blundered and plundered

The voters must take the scraps and vote for the opposition to get out of this rut once and for all.

That is why the advice of PAS spiritual adviser Nik Aziz Nik Mat applies to all of us citizens: “Take the gifts that the BN government gives because it is your right but give your vote to the opposition Pakatan Rakyat.”
Overall, the BN government has blundered and plundered the nation in all its years of administration.

Rural voters aside, even many urban voters are still not convinced of this and are still thinking of giving Najib a chance to implement more “transformations” for the nation.

This leads one to think that Malaysians in general are either stupid, easily duped, ignorant, in denial or are just plain not bothered whatever happens even if the nation is in dire straits as long as they can still earn a living in their daily job.

That Malaysia has 241,740 bankrupts is a worrying statistic (information furnished by the finance ministry during the current Parliament sitting).

“Before a nation goes bankrupt, the citizens go bankrupt first,” remarked Azan Ismail, the PKR MP for Indera Mahkota in Pahang. Will Malaysia continue to go downhill?

Selena Tay is a FMT columnist.