Tan Sri Ariff Yusof
This book is more like a report card on the activities of the Speaker who was appointed to the helm when the new Pakatan Harapan coalition government was elected. The government was short-lived with its own appointment premier sabotaging his own partners in what came to be known as the Sheraton move. Mahathir Mohammad was never happy with the unsettlingly high participation of opposition members in the new government. A bigoted racist by mindset, from the get-go, he had been devising a way to get his former party UMNO back to power without Najib and his band of thieves. Maybe by design or double-crossing, Mahathir got ousted instead. What remains now is a sleuth of incompetent clowns who dance around in their self aggrandising Emperor's New Clothes. Hyenas and jackals have all come out to play in a system that borders on lawlessness day by day.
He gives a brief account of his childhood days, his alma mater, his family, and his career and delves right into his sudden appointment as the Speaker in the august house of the Parliament. He took it as a national service as he already had a fulfilling daytime job in the legal circles. As the author puts it, nobody in his right mind would have a lifelong ambition to be the Speaker of the Parliament!
It is disheartening to read about how a respected man of scholarship and a former judge has to condescend to the schoolboy hooligans-like antics of grown men who were elected to ensure the smooth running of the country. These buffoons seem to be high on some kind of intoxicant that they have no qualms about using profanity in the House, that too in front of visitors, including schoolchildren. Coincidentally, the author seems to have drawn his fascination with politics from a similar visit during his school days. Oh yes, parliamentarians were more civil and proficient in their articulation then. In the short 22 months of the Pakatan rule, we witnessed mayhem and devious plot within and without the coalition to derail their administration.
Doing the right or moral thing does not come into the equation. It is all about the party line or some other dog whistle elsewhere. There must surely be some invisible hands above that survived all atrocities from the fall of the Malacca Empire all through the European and Japanese occupation to come out smelling of roses who control the narratives. They must have found the formula to stay relevant all these years.
They say that the Speaker is the person in charge of the Parliament, but is he really? With so many protocols and precedence set, it takes a whole department to ensure the institution's running. Any deviation from the norm would be construed as dishonouring the esteemed House. Many detractors are ever willing, with hawk-eyed tenacity, to pinpoint his deficiencies.
That is all in a day's work. In between slogging it out in the dogfight in the arena of Parliamentary sessions, the author managed to perform his other official duties. Then came Covid that the hidden hands probably used it for their convenience. In the sly, the Sheraton Move was brewing, which finally collapsed a democratically elected government to be replaced clandestinely with a 'back-door' government. The political uncertainty, however, continues. Many by-elections and state elections have shown trends of voters giving up on an alternative to the one they have known since Independence.
He gives a brief account of his childhood days, his alma mater, his family, and his career and delves right into his sudden appointment as the Speaker in the august house of the Parliament. He took it as a national service as he already had a fulfilling daytime job in the legal circles. As the author puts it, nobody in his right mind would have a lifelong ambition to be the Speaker of the Parliament!
It is disheartening to read about how a respected man of scholarship and a former judge has to condescend to the schoolboy hooligans-like antics of grown men who were elected to ensure the smooth running of the country. These buffoons seem to be high on some kind of intoxicant that they have no qualms about using profanity in the House, that too in front of visitors, including schoolchildren. Coincidentally, the author seems to have drawn his fascination with politics from a similar visit during his school days. Oh yes, parliamentarians were more civil and proficient in their articulation then. In the short 22 months of the Pakatan rule, we witnessed mayhem and devious plot within and without the coalition to derail their administration.
Doing the right or moral thing does not come into the equation. It is all about the party line or some other dog whistle elsewhere. There must surely be some invisible hands above that survived all atrocities from the fall of the Malacca Empire all through the European and Japanese occupation to come out smelling of roses who control the narratives. They must have found the formula to stay relevant all these years.
They say that the Speaker is the person in charge of the Parliament, but is he really? With so many protocols and precedence set, it takes a whole department to ensure the institution's running. Any deviation from the norm would be construed as dishonouring the esteemed House. Many detractors are ever willing, with hawk-eyed tenacity, to pinpoint his deficiencies.
That is all in a day's work. In between slogging it out in the dogfight in the arena of Parliamentary sessions, the author managed to perform his other official duties. Then came Covid that the hidden hands probably used it for their convenience. In the sly, the Sheraton Move was brewing, which finally collapsed a democratically elected government to be replaced clandestinely with a 'back-door' government. The political uncertainty, however, continues. Many by-elections and state elections have shown trends of voters giving up on an alternative to the one they have known since Independence.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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