Pemandu the greater evil

Do you'll remember Nokia?
3 yrs ago, in the end 2007, Nokia was sitting pretty. Its stock was trading at about $  40 US, giving it a market capitalization of $150 Billion. The employees were very rich having be awarded generous stock options, and life was good.

Nokia was the undisputed champion in the mobile phone industry. It had taken on and decimated Motorola, Siemens, Alcatel, Sony, Ericsson and could face down anything Samsung could throw at them. Life was good, profits were strong, and the executives were joking about the latest company to try and join the phone bandwagon. Even worse this other company's product could not play Flash, could not record videos, did not have a GPS chip, did not have 3D audio, consumed more battery power, was heavier and the best of all - even its screen size was non industry standard.

The Nokia execs were in stitches. Those folks were charging $ 599 for a Phone that was not even 3G! Furthermore, those other folk was heavily reliant on the US market, and to make matters worse, they could only sell their phones to subscribers of one sole carrier - i.e to paraphrase, they could only sell those phones to subscribers of TM and not Maxis.

3 yrs later, Nokia has fired their CEO. Their stock price has dropped by 75%. They are surviving on their low priced phones and have to continue to lower prices on their expensive phones to compete. The other company on the other hand is now the largest technology company in the world, last year alone it sold $50 billion worth of those phones, and no one can stop them.

Ladies and Gentleman,

There are 3 black dates in our country's history. The first is May 13, 1969. The second is the day Dr. Mahathir became PM. And the 3rd is the day when Najib created Pemandu.

This Pemandu will cause BN to suffer the same fate as what befell Nokia. Unless we act now, in 3 yrs time, we will lose 75% of our seats, and Anwar Ibrahim will be Prime Minister (hopefully)
Between Mahathir becoming PM and Najib creating Pemandu, I say the Pemandu is worse. Dr. Mahathir is "sombong" and "evil". Pemandu on the other hand is all those and more.
I can accuse Dr. Mahathir of many things, but i will never accuse him of ever being crazy enough to create this thing called Pemandu.

Just consider this. We have a unit called Pemandu, headed by an ex-CEO of an airline who hired a bunch of young guys fresh from university to advise the PM on what to do. Come on lah, that sounds so ridiculous that the least Najib could do was to keep it a secret. Because, in 2008, millions of Malaysians and descendants of immigrant foreigners (to quote the racist Mahathir) stood in queue to choose Barisan Nasional to form the Federal Government.

As the Chairman of BN and President of UMNO, Najib becomes the Prime Minister. As Prime Minister he must provide the leadership, make the tough decisions and be seen to be the leader at all times. Now I really  do not like Dr. Mahathir with a vengance, but I admit, there was not a moment when he was PM where he appeared to make a decision because he was following the advice of the President of the United States, the Prime Minster of Britain, his great, and charismatic Deputy, his cabinet Ministers or any Ali, Ah Kao or Ramasamy. 

But today we have now a formalized Government within a Government, Idris Jala makes an announcement and Najib backs him on it. He backed Idris Jala on the subsidy cut - an unnecessary and politically costly move, the MRT - a gargantuan project that serves to reinforce the notion that BN is all about spending other peoples money and some of the most absurd economic projections ever to see mainstream media print.
For example, take Idris Jala announcement that Malaysia requires $445 billion US in terms of FDI. This news hit the foreign news wires on Saturday, and the next day, I challenged Mukhriz Mahathir, Deputy Minister of MITI on how on earth was he going to ensure MITI achieves the target. And Mukhriz did not know.

Now surprisingly, I am not blaming Mukhriz. We know his capability. He is no better nor worse than the rest of the cabinet, putting it mildly.

But the issue is this. Since when is a projection realistic. Since when spending RM 100 billion on an MRT will supposedly create a trillion dollar GNP. These things sound good on paper. These things are supposed to be funded by the private sector.

But poke harder and it crumbles like a deck of cards. The assumptions are Alice in Wonderland like. The private sector has seen this sort of gobbledygook before. No chance - its now going to be funded by issuing more Government debt i.e. you, and your children are going to pay for Jala's programmes. At the same time, Jala made sure that you are going to pay more for your basic necessities. More for food, more for oil, and soon more for electricity.

Now if the Prime Minister thinks that he can make Jala the bad guy, while he is political unscathed  by this, he is right. People will hate Jala. They will write all sorts of stories about him. On the other hand, they will say, I have no problem with Najib.

But come election day, they will vote for Anwar Ibrahim!

This company was just had one product in their portfolio. Nokia had dozens. Nokia had divided humanity into 20 groups and there was a product for each group. The other company had only 1 product and it was supposed to serve the functions of all groups. Furthermore, the design was bizarre. The other company's phone had a metal casing . Now anybody knows that if you have a metal casing, you create a "Faraday" cage and no radio waves can penetrate into the circuitry. Posted by Wenger J Khairy