NST, Pak Lah and Tun Dr. Mahathir

The time has finally come for me to say goodbye to New Straits Time (NST). Mom has decided to stop buying NST and has told the newspaper vendor to replace it with The Star. A bit of mixed feelings actually cos this is the paper that I grew up with. Lazarus Rokk, Khalid Redza and few other Sports editors are some of the names which I can still recall since my primary school days in the early 90s.

NST today is no longer the same as during Dato' A. Kadir Jasin's era or the previous Group Editor in Chiefs before him. NST used to have a lot of good columns and articles to read, but not anymore. Save for Johan Jaafar's weekly Saturday column, I don't find any other column worth reading by the rest of the NST columnist, including the writings by the so-called Singaporean agent, Mr. Kalimullah Masheerul Hassan.

The next main factor, is obviously due to their endless attack toward former Prime Minister, Tun Dr. Mahathir. Never before in the history of NST, for as long as I can remember, that I have seen the paper quoting remarks by opposition leaders, well above other government leaders, in this matter, Lim Kit Siang and Karpal Singh, week after week hitting at UMNO leaders. I was utterly disgusted at the manner the top editors of NST in publishing their news stories, to the extent that at one time I begin to question, has NST turned into DAP's newspaper or what?

Just a point of note here. To me, whatever happened during Tun's leadership does not have anything to do with the weaknesses of Pak Lah's administration. People might say Pak Lah is merely following the same previous system by Tun Dr. Mahathir. So could it be the fault of the system? I would clearly answer with a big No. Admittedly, it is not 100% perfect, and can never be as such, but even if we do have a perfect system but having a weak and incompetent leadership (read: Abdullah Badawi), it won't mean anything. One thing that I really don't understand is that why Pak Lah don't want to take advice from Tun himself? Tun was the PM for 22 years and obviously he knows a lot of things, but no, Pak Lah prefer to recruit these young 30-something boys, or better known as the 4th floor boys as his advisors.

On the issue of the petrol hike, while I do admit the price of crude oil have sky rocketed for about 400% in the past 3 years, I feel that it is also due to the government's mismanagement of the country's economy that led to the painful petrol hike in 2006, 30 sen increase, and last week, 78 sen. When the petrol was increased 30 sen years ago, we, the rakyat were told that the 4 billion subsidy will be used for public transportation. Fine. Now, questions is, where have all the 4 billion of money being spend into? Do we see any new LRT or KTM commuter trains yet? The public transportation have really gone worse. And then, when Pak Lah announced the 78 sen hike, it was said that the subsidy money will be used for food security. Oh, so what has happened to the previous public transportation plan? Pak Lah clearly doesn't have the vision for Malaysia.

I would rather believe Anwar Ibrahim's worrying statement regarding the opposition's defection plan by Sabahan MPs, this coming September than believing Pak Lah when he said the government will not increase petrol price in future. Somehow though some people might think that Anwar could just be playing politics with his statements, I feel that Anwar couldn't be that stupid enough to jeopardise his political future by "telling lies" to the people about the so-called defection plan. It's like a do-or-die mission for Anwar. If the defection does not take place, nobody would trust him anymore, regardless of what excuses that he can provide. I just hope that it will not happen.