The Political Legitimacy to Reject a Leader

YABhg Tun Dr. Mahathir,

I noticed that you had uttered a lot of grievances hinting Dato Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi as the sole culprit for all government faults which had been found by you. If you had really been annoyed so much by the PM who was implicitly described by you as the most disobedient and most treacherous man whom you had ever met in your life, then why didn't you try to persuade your beloved son, Dato Mukhriz Mahathir, to table a motion of no confidence against Dato Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi in the Parliament?

If you yourself as the honourable and the respectful father of Dato Mukhriz does not even stand in the position to be able to convince your beloved son to make the first move of checkmate against Dato Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi in Parliament, then I do not see what kind of political legitimacy you still possess now which enables you to justify all your incompetency accusations made against Dato Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi in relation to his functioning in the capacity of the Prime Minister.

I noticed that you made a lot of non-performance complaints against Dato Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi. However, I have yet to hear from you the strong and concrete evidences which you may present for the purpose of supporting your complaints. No doubt Abdullah's government has raised up the fuel cost to a certain extent that may not be sustainable for many underprivileged individuals and families. However, many of us are yet to see what kind of graces Abdullah's government is going to provide in order to help the needies for overcoming the economic hardship. I do not know why you have to start an attack on Abdullah's government so hastily before even getting to know about the time-lagged effect of the fuel price hike decision.

We needed a price reform in the fuel cost structure before the government finances had really run into insolvent situation. It is deemed that a fuel cost hike might help to curb the uncontrollable waste on the fuel consumption that already happened in the past when the fuel cost had to be heavily and irrationally subsidised by the government.

During your tenure of the PM, the Crude might have gone up to the maximum of only USD33 per barrel. However, the current Crude price is about USD140 per barrel. If you keep insistence on the viability and sustainability of the government's conventional fuel subsidy policy even in the midst of heightened Crude price, then you are indeed asking Abdullah's government to take the high risk of possibly running into a financial bankrupt situation when the Crude commodity is exposing itself to the unpredictable high speculative risk of upward trendiness.

Tun, I understand that during your tenure as the PM, you yourself had already gained several bad experiences from losing huge money of the government in some speculative games. I hope you are not forgetting about the story of market collapse which happened in early 1980s in relation to tin ore trade in London and which you had detrimentally gotten involved as the manager of a Cartel organisation consisting of members from tin producing countries such as Bolivia, Thailand and Malaysia. I hope you are also not forgetting that you have already lost multi-billion dollars of the people's wealth in your vain effort to support the currency value of Ringgit against the US dollar during the currency attack in 1997-1998.

Your past failure in overcoming the financial fallout during a speculative attack have clearly shown that you are not a competent manager who can grasp a good fist fighting as the capable big boxer in the platform of commodity trading. Therefore, all your comments on the government's recent decision of fuel subsidy removal must be studied carefully with some reservation before the truthfulness of your comments can be taken for granted since you are not an infallible God.

Tun's past performance in the financial mismanagement and the ignorance in using the hedge fund instrument in order to cover the high financial risk exposure has also proven that Tun is just another layman in financial market who has yet to learn how to cut loss during a stressful financial exposure situation.

Knowing about your own weaknesses, I sincerely hope that Tun will learn to be much more humble and learn to be much more forgiving when doing an evaluation on the performance of Abdullah's government. In politics, it is totally absurd for us to always think too highly of our self-worth and incline to believe that we ourselves always sit in the peak of social norm and quality standard therefore it is justifiable for us to commence a character assassination on our political opponent. It is always fruitful for us to remind ourselves that other people may have much better knowledge about something than we ourselves therefore it is worthwhile giving a chance and a reasonable time frame for someone else to perform before we really jump into the conclusion that this person has to be outrightly rejected or overthrown because of sheer folly out of incompetency!