Najib miscalculates with his guessing game

Selena Tay

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?

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.