Muhyiddin Is The Worse PM In History – Leading Malaysia Towards A Failed State During His Tenure

There is no upside to replacing Anwar with Muhyiddin

EARLIER today (20 March), out of nowhere, Perikatan Nasional chairman Muhyiddin Yassin came out with an odd statement to indicate that he is confident that the opposition coalition is much more capable of administering the country than the unity government.

“We (PN) can fix the situation. The people are currently going through a difficult time, whether it is no increase in income, the rising cost of goods or the lack of subsidies.

As a proof to his declaration, he will then cite the coalition’s achievement in managing the Covid-19 pandemic when it was in power.

According to Muhyiddin, even though there was no precedent on how to manage Covid-19, under his leadership, his administration had governed the country well and helped the country to survive the pandemic.

Despite the lack of a vaccine, Muhyiddin remarked, PN managed to resolve the various problems brought on by the pandemic, including reviving the country’s economy.

He also cited the roll out of the nationwide vaccination programme in February 2021 as a testament of his success.

According to Muhyiddin, if it were not for the initiatives that he initiated, “a large number of them ( meaning the people) would not have been able to carry on with their lives.”

In response to Muhyiddin’s claim , Umno Supreme Council member Puad Zarkashi would criticise Muhyiddin for touting his 17 months in the top office as a success, by declaring that Muhyiddin’s “half-baked” Covid-19 lockdowns failed to lower the pandemic’s death rate but heavily impacted the economy.

“The height of Muhyiddin’s failure was the white flag campaign across the country in 2021. Does Muhyiddin have a short-term memory problem?” Puad would say in his Facebook post to rest his case.

As we all know, the white flag campaign involved affected families who could no longer bear the brunt of the covid lockdowns, to hang a white flag or cloth in front of their homes to alert neighbours and good samaritans of the desperation of their situation.

It came at a time when many were struggling to put food on the table amid an indefinite lockdown that resulted in job losses and slashed incomes.

Arguably, it was the white flag campaign that caused public approval to so turn against the Muhyiddin administration, that the Muhyiddin administration was toppled not long after by an internal power struggle, which removed Muhyiddin and installed Ismail Sabri as the PM of the country.

Personally, I think that both Muhyiddin and Puad are right.

The reason their opinion is conflicting, in my opinion, is because they are describing different phases of Muhyiddin’s 17 month administration.

Muhyiddin is describing the beginning stages of his administration while Puad is describing its tail end.

The beginning stages of Muhyiddin administration occurred just weeks before the covid pandemic raged around the globe. At the time that it came about, people had almost given up at the inability of the Pakatan 1.0 government under Mahathir to provide a semblance of coherence or stability to the country, despite reigning for nearly 2 years.

The Pakatan 1.0 government was so new and unprepared for their role as the government, that none of them seemed to know what to do, once the responsibility of governing the nation was handed to them.

To make it worse, they were so engulfed with mistrust and suspicion towards each other, that even their own ministers from different coalition partners were frequently contradicting and attacking each other.

Considering the abject failure of the Pakatan 1.0 government to provide the nation with a semblance of a stable and functional government in its 22 months of reign, it was indeed a welcome relief to have Muhyiddin take the stewardship of the country at the onset of covid.

Muhyiddin was able to put together a functional and stable government, which the country direly needed to address the unprecedented global pandemic that was raging in the world.

The Muhyiddin administration, mind you, did not come out with any inventive or original initiatives to address the pandemic. On the whole, it merely followed the actions and procedures that were taken by other countries in the world or that were proscribed by such organisations as the WHO.

It is main achievement, by my reckoning, was that it was able to institute a stable and functional government to address the pandemic and displace the dysfunctional an incoherent Pakatan 1.0 government, which likely might not have been able to handle the unprecedented problem that that country was facing during the pandemic period.

However, in the later part of its administration, the Muhyiddin government was suspected, in my opinion, rightfully, of trying to exaggerate and prolong the pandemic phase in the country, simply to remain in power.

It would, for example, refuse to allow the parliament to convene, by citing safety concerns due to the pandemic, even at a time when people in the country had more or less returned to their normal routine.

At the peak of its estrangement with reality, the Muhyiddin government would even seek to institute “emergency rule” in the country, purportedly to handle the covid pandemic, when people had more or less returned to normal life, at a time when the effects of the pandemic appeared waning all around the globe.

That the Muhyiddin government seemed determined to prolong the shutdown of the country indefinitely, ostensibly to address the pandemic, would result in a segment of the population to raise a white flag outside of their house, to indicate the dire situation that they were in.

Many of those who had raised the white flag were so desperate that they had to be provided with food for the day by their neighbours and good Samaritans to continue living.

That the Muhyiddin administration was seen to cause the people to stoop so low as to “beg” for their livelihood, when it was widely seen that it was doing so not to address a legitimate healthcare concern, but merely to cling to power, was as Puad said, largely seen by Malaysians as a pinnacle of its failure.

Not long after the white flag movement laid bare the failures of the Muhyiddin administration, it was removed from power by an internal power struggle that received the consent of the people and the royalty.

Overall, I would rate Muhyiddin’s 17 month old government during the peak of the covid pandemic period as a “not bad, but not good” government.

It was not bad, because it did remove the dysfunctionality and instability that plagued the previous government enough to establish a functional and stable government that was able to follow international measures to address the pandemic.

It was also not bad in that it can be said to have successfully followed the international measures that were instituted by such organisations as WHO to address the pandemic.

For much of the pandemic, it also made us feel that we had a government we could turn to if we needed help.

It was not good however, because it tried to exploit the pandemic to pursue its own self interest, even to the point of causing the people a great amount of difficulty, in order to remain in power.

It was also not good because other than providing stability and functionality, it didn’t show any originality or ingenuity to address the novel problems that the pandemic caused. .

Considering that, I doubt that if Muhyiddin returns as the PM, he will be able to perform better than the Anwar.

Anwar, just like Muhyiddin, has been able to form a functional and stable government.

Muhyiddin however, has not shown any proof that he will be able to be more original or inventive than Anwar, to solve the ever rising new challenges that are occurring in the post-pandemic world.

At best, Muhyiddin will probably only be able to match the performance of the unity government.

Considering that even at best, it would be only able to match the stability and functionality that is already being provided by the current government, without showing that it has any capability or originality to address the challenges that the unity government is struggling to address, I don’t see why anyone should deem Muhyiddin as a superior alternative to Anwar.

If there is any reason why anyone in the country should be interested to see Muhyiddin replacing Anwar as the Prime Minister, it is solely for racial or religious reasons.

One might argue that Muhyiddin will serve the interest of the Malays and the Muslims as the Prime Minister better than Anwar, but other than this reason, there is really no upside to replacing Anwar with Muhyiddin.

Source : Babbasnews

Malaysia En Route To Failed Statehood Under Muhyiddin Yassin

The desperate plight of poor Malaysians coupled with the latest political shenanigans of the nation’s leading parties amid an indefinite lockdown are signs of the descent of a once-proud nation, a column on Bloomberg read on Friday (July 9).

Mr Daniel Moss, a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Asian economies, said the white flags flown by Malaysians to signal a need for food and a bit of cash were “shorthand for discontent at the atrophying state and troubled economy”.  

The politicians, meanwhile, are caught up in a years-long saga, the most recent twist coming from Umno, which declared “it will leave the ramshackle coalition presided over by Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin and urged him to quit”.

Mr Moss warned that this may not be the end of the machinations as the United Malays National Organisation (Umno) was split between the members who wished to reclaim the party’s dominant position and MPs who wanted to keep the “nice cabinet posts” that Mr Muhyiddin had given them. 

He said impoverished folk had raised a flag of surrender with no hope and little desire to overthrow the government and in any case, it wasn’t clear these days that there’s one to topple.

“The country’s prime ministers were once given grudging credit for stable leadership, albeit with authoritarian traits. However, lawmakers have proven breathtakingly unable to coalesce around a figure or programme to guide Malaysia through this plight,” Mr Moss wrote.

“The nation is beset by multiple crises — social, economic and political — fed and worsened by each other. It may only be a slight exaggeration to invoke the dreaded label of a failed state.”

He said the surrender flag captures the end of a strutting, can-do mentality, or “boleh.”

“Citizens are stepping in where authorities have failed as the pandemic has delivered seemingly endless misery.

“Only a bit more than 8 per cent of Malaysians have received both vaccine shots, as of Monday. Some of the strictest lockdowns have been in Kuala Lumpur and the nearby commercial powerhouse of Selangor state, and taken a toll. At their worst, factories have been shut, public transportation has run on a skeleton schedule, and the military has manned road blocks. Some measures have been eased, but large parts of the country remain shuttered.”

In the past, Malaysia had shone as an emerging-market icon, he said.

Source : Today Online

Covid: Malaysia Fourth Worst Place To Be As Omicron Looms

Malaysia ranked 50th of 53 economies in Bloomberg’s Covid Resilience Ranking last month, scoring poorly on lockdown severity, flight capacity, vaccinated travel routes, community mobility, and 2021 GDP growth forecast.

A year since Bloomberg’s Covid Resilience Ranking debuted in November 2020, Malaysia now ranks among the bottom at 50th out of the 53 largest economies.

n Bloomberg’s November 2021 Covid Resilience Ranking released last November 30, Malaysia ranked only above Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines, with Malaysia maintaining its 50th spot from October. Singapore and Thailand placed 37th and 47th respectively.

Malaysia’s ranking gradually fell from its peak in November 2020 to among the worst countries in August this year, at the height of its epidemic, before picking up slowly, albeit still among the bottom-ranked nations.

Malaysia’s decline to “worse” ranking started last June after a steep fall from April.

Bloomberg’s Covid Resilience Ranking looks at the success of the world’s 53 biggest economies at containing Covid-19 with the least amount of social and economic disruption. Twelve indicators are measured, with equal weightage — across reopening progress, Covid-19 status, and quality of life — to produce a country’s resilience score that is the average performance across the dozen indicators.

Malaysia’s overall resilience score in last month’s ranking was 49.7 out of 100, the second-worst classification.

Source : Code Blue

 61 per cent of respondents were dissatisfied with how Muhyiddin government is managing the Covid-19 outbreak

When the Covid-19 pandemic broke out in Malaysia in February last year, Ms Wan Nor Aisyah Karim believed that the country was in good hands.

Fast forward 18 months, the 25-year-old kindergarten teacher said she is no longer sure if the country is heading in the right direction.

“I had confidence in the government because it managed to bring down the cases to almost zero even after a change in administration. But now, I’m not so sure because things went from bad to worse,” she said, referring to the collapse of the Pakatan Harapan administration in February last year, and it being replaced by Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin’s Perikatan Nasional (PN).

When PN took over in March last year, new Covid-19 infections were hovering below 30 cases daily. That figure began climbing steadily from the beginning of this year, and has accelerated since May, driven by the more transmissible Delta strain.

On Friday (Aug 6), new daily infections spiked at 20,889 cases, the highest since the pandemic began.

“I believe the constant political bickering, coupled with poor policymaking, has led us here and it’s the rakyat (people) who are suffering,” she added.

Based on a recent survey done by independent pollster Merdeka Centre, Ms Aisyah is voicing most people’s dissatisfaction with how the government has managed the country and the pandemic.

In its survey ahead of the parliamentary sitting almost two weeks ago, the centre found that nearly 64 per cent of respondents believe that the country is headed in the wrong direction.

This is almost double the number from June last year, when the number of daily coronavirus cases was close to zero and only 32 per cent of respondents thought the country was headed the wrong way.

These survey results were revealed by the centre’s executive director, Mr Ibrahim Suffian, in an interview with news channel Astro Awani on Thursday.

He said that 61 per cent of respondents were dissatisfied with how the government is managing the Covid-19 outbreak, compared against the 93 per cent who were satisfied with how the pandemic was handled last year, during its initial stages.

“We noticed that in the last three months or so, the sentiment has spread not just within the urban centres, but also in other parts of the country, even in Sabah and Sarawak. Particularly the voters in rural areas, bumiputeras (Malays and aboriginal communities) are now also reflecting a more negative sentiment towards the government and how it’s handling the pandemic and the political situation,” he said.

He also noted that approval ratings for Tan Sri Muhyiddin have fallen to 50 per cent, compared with 67 per cent in April.

Source : Straits Times

Battling COVID-19 is Muhyiddin’s greatest failure, ain’t his biggest success

.RETIRED DAP supremo Lim Kit Siang has branded as “utter rubbish” the recent claim of Bersatu Youth chief Wan Ahmad Fayhsal Wan Ahmad Kamal that Malaysia lost control of the COVID-19 pandemic because the then Pakatan Harapan (PH) administration made the mistake in February 2020 by being slow in barring tourists from risky countries.

This is because the PH government was toppled by the infamous Sheraton Move political conspiracy in that month and secondly, the COVID-19 pandemic in Malaysia was under control until National Day 2020.

“Malaysia lost control of the COVID-19 pandemic when the Perikatan Nasional (PN) was power-greedy and forced the holding of the Sabah state general election in September 2020,” asserted the veteran lawmaker and former Iskandar Puteri MP in his latest blog.

“We are in an era where there are people who believe it is possible to make a wrong into a right. This is most apparent in the social media, as lately there has been in circulation WhatsApp of past events passing off as current events.

“In the modern era of information technology, it is easier to try to rewrite history and whitewash the sins of the past.”

Dishing out the truth to refresh the memory of people brainwashed by the untruth, Kit Siang who was a major critic of the then ‘backdoor’ government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, pointed to the very fact that in the National Day month of August 2020, Malaysia had 364 COVID-19 cases and two deaths from the pandemic.

“But in the National Day month of August 2021, Malaysia had more than 630,000 COVID-19 cases and more than 7,400 deaths – an exponential increase of 17,000 times for the number of COVID-19 cases and more than, 3,700 times the COVID-19 deaths!” claimed then former Opposition leader.

“And that was after the first ‘backdoor’ prime minister (PM) Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin illegitimately, illegally and unconstitutionally suspended Parliament on January 11, 2021 when Malaysia had cumulative total of 138,224 COVID-19 cases and 555 COVID-19 deaths.”

Six months later when Muhyiddin resigned as ‘backdoor’ PM, the cumulative total of COVID-19 cases was over 10 times more, reaching nearly 1.5 million case and the cumulative total of COVID-19 deaths were 24 times more with over 13,000 COVID-19 deaths.

“Yet Bersatu and PN want to rewrite history and claimed that Muhyddin’s greatest success was to conquer the COVID-19 pandemic when the truth was opposite – it was Muhyiddin’s greatest failure,” lamented Kit Siang.

“When Muhyddin claimed during the 15th General Election (GE15) that ‘only a few died’ as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic under his premiership, it was his most irresponsible statement – second only to his 2010 statement that he was ‘Malay first’ and not ‘Malaysian first’.” 

Source : Focus Malaysia

Muhyiddin Accountable For ‘Longest Covid Lockdown, Highest Deaths’: Anwar

Anwar Ibrahim today accused former prime minister Muhyiddin Yassin of failing to control the Covid-19 pandemic that saw high mortality in Malaysia despite one of the world’s longest stay-at-home orders.

Anwar Ibrahim, Pakatan Harapan’s (PH) prime minister candidate who is contesting the Tambun federal seat in Perak in the 15th general election, said Muhyiddin’s futile pandemic strategies not only kept people from earning a living due to harsh lockdowns, but also led to one of the highest cumulative per capita deaths “in the world”.

“When Muhyiddin was in power, how long did he put the country under lockdown? How were people supposed to earn a living? Was he not aware that people were suffering? Was he not aware that people were struggling to feed their children? He was not mindful of these issues.

“That is why our lockdown during Covid was the longest in the world. But at the same time, we also have the highest number of deaths in the world – 36,000. He (Muhyiddin) should be answerable to this,” Anwar told voters in Segamat, Johor, on his nationwide campaign trail.

Contrary to Anwar’s claim, Malaysia’s death toll of 36,495 as of November 7 was the 29th highest globally in absolute figures, without adjusting for population size, according to Our World In Data. 

Based on the global data tracker, Malaysia, however, has the highest Covid-19 deaths per capita among Asean countries at 1,075 deaths per million people. Indonesia’s cumulative deaths per capita is the second highest in the region at 576 deaths per million people, nearly half the numbers reported in Malaysia.

Malaysia also has one of the highest Covid death rates in Asia, behind Hong Kong and ahead of India. However, the number of cumulative Covid-19 deaths per capita in countries such as the United States and United Kingdom is much higher, with deaths per capita due to the virus hitting over 3,000 per million people, as of November 7 – triple that of Malaysia’s.

Data released by the Department of Statistics Malaysia (DOSM) last month showed that Covid-19 was the leading cause of death in the country last year, overtaking ischaemic heart disease as the principal cause of death during the surge of Malaysia’s epidemic in 2021.

Covid also contributed to more than half of maternal deaths and killed one in five people under the age of 40, DOSM stats revealed.