FOURTEENTH GENERAL ELECTIONS, 2018: IT’S MOSTLY BETWEEN UMNO – AND CORRUPTED UMNO

– AND UMNO REJECTS AND MISFITS, RENEGATES, INGRATES AND CARPETBAGGERS AND IN ‘MOM-AND-POP’ POLITICAL PARTIES – DANCING IN DIFFERENT STEPS AND TUNE IN A MALAYSIA THAT IS SET TO ACHIEVE GREATER HEIGHTS.

By Mansor Puteh

The Fourteenth General Elections (GE14 or PRU14) which is expected to be held in a couple of months will be the most unusual and weird one that the country will see.

It is going to be between UMNO and CORRUPTED UMNO, comprising mostly of former UMNO diehard leaders and other rejects and misfits who have ganged up to form PKR and PPBM, which all look like faint reflections of the parties their founders and leaders were in many years before, UMNO with their leaders full of rants on the same issues like if they do not do that they cannot be in the limelight.

DAP and PKR are basically ‘mom-and-pop’ political parties anyway which thrive on petty issues using a small coterie of like-minded and self-appointed and self-proclaimed ‘saviors’ of Malaysia.

And they will be with the DAP, a perennial hopeful, in between, to help stir some supporters of component parties in Barisan Nasional (BN) to join them at the polls who mostly comprise of those who felt disillusioned with UMNO but mostly for personal and exceptionally ridiculous reasons and beliefs.

Unfortunately, most of them are those in the second or third or even fourth levels in UMNO party hierarchy who can now claim to have some measure of prominence being able to say nasty words against the party that had given them something that they could never have got on their own before, in terms of posts and even wealth.

DAP on its own cannot do much damage to reputation of UMNO and BN; they have to create the split in Melayu votes and grab some from UMNO to get more seats.

And Malaysians generally do not favor renegades and ingrates; worse, carpetbaggers who jump from all over the place and not achieving anything at the places where they had been to before.

They are those who appear at the constituencies where they are running and once they had managed to win the seats, they disappear, leaving UMNO and the government to service the community there.

And if they start to feel unwanted there, they will go elsewhere where they did not have any record of not being there after the elections.

Malaysian voters must learn to reject such people who only care for themselves but not the voters who had given their trust in them.

Best of all if there is legislation that forces anyone who wishes to run in any election to stay at the place where they were born at and grew up in, so that they cannot go elsewhere where they had not been to before, to know the local community there, better, and to be able to serve them more if they are elected to the state assembly or parliament.

But the opposition and charge that they and their unlikely new supporters have are nothing but old ones, which many Malaysians have by now become too innocuous to worry about, with new and more interesting issues that they can spend time to ponder.

Basically the call by the opposition to the voters and fench-sitters and those first-time votes is for them to support and vote them, so that they could replace the present Merdeka Government, so they could infuse the country with their new vision.

But alas, this is just talk. Their vision is nothing but a mirage and a nasty ploy.

There is no set of constructive plans that they could ever come up other than to try and better what have been made available by the government since Merdeka which many find to be strange considering how the DAP and PKR especially and those former UMNO diehards, too, are not without faults.

The conglomerate of people from the opposition that they could assemble resemble are some of the most unlikely characters in Malaysian politics, some of whom had been around since the 1960s, who have been screaming nasty slogans and other diatribes but to no avail.

Their only claim to power that had helped them to expand their power base and influence stems mostly from the unlikely and unusual support that they had managed to get from PAS.

And if PAS stops to do that to them in GE14, then DAP too could find themselves with so few seats, and be reduced to a party they were in some previous general elections with no standing in the state assemblies and parliament.

Whatever it is, even the few state governments that they had managed to control the last two terms have shown their true colors, which have become more stained each time some of their leaders are embroiled in some scandals which involve the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Agency (SPRM) and others.

Even the areas where their senior leaders now control have not seen any change and are being served by UMNO and BN. 

The unlikely doyen of the opposition maybe former Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohammad, but he still has to stand in the shadows of DAP honcho, Lim Kit Siang, who many see as a person who now represents a faint reflection of his former self with no new slogans to shout other than to ‘Save Malaysia’.

Mahathir and former UMNO diehard, Anwar Ibrahim can never be seen as a potential threat to UMNO and BN but mostly as ingrates with Kit Siang as a confused leader of the Left whose visions for the country had become a misnomer and his fantasy.

So alas, many are not wrong in saying how Malaysia must be thus saved from them, the DAP and opposition.

The advent of the internet which they had used to the utmost has now become a more convenient tool for the government and UMNO too, having learnt to use it a bit late that caused them to lose some seats that they had kept for many elections. 

Mahathir and Kit Siang, do not pose much of a threat to Prime Minister, Najib Tun Razak, who has led UMNO many years and had maintained both his international and national stature the more he is criticized and belittled.

The divergent ways and approaches that Najib had conducted and used, made his persona more striking and many can see how Mahathir’s former glow to have been stained the more he attends opposition organized political rallies and gatherings or ‘ceramah’ saying the same thing again and again, without fear of repercussions simply because he thinks he is ‘above the law’ because of his former stature and even age.

In the final analysis GE14 or PRU14 will see the last of the Left and opposition as we knew them before.