Dr M rejects Najib as PM

Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad said he had second thoughts about Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak becoming Prime Minister as Najib had failed to speak up about the real reasons behind Barisan Nasional’s losses in the general election.

The former prime minister claimed that Najib was not “brave enough” to directly say anything that was not liked by his boss.

“We see that he is a penakut (coward). He is always saying, ‘yes sir, yes sir, saya sokong, saya sokong (I support, I support).”

On the plan to set up a judicial appointments commission and the goodwill ex-gratia payments to six senior judges, Dr Mahathir claimed it was a political move to boost the government’s popularity.

He said there was no reason for the compensation because everything was done in accordance with the law.

“If they can show me the removal of (former Lord President) Tun Salleh Abas was against procedures prescribed by the law, please let me know,” he said.

Source: Dr M: Najib should not be PM

First, he selected Pak Lah to be PM when he had the option and discretion to pick Najib to succeed. At that time, he must have in himself a good reason not to pick Najib. He knew both of them and he knew well their background and behaviors. He knew Pak Lah was the only piece of loin that is the least dirty than all the rest within his options. What he did not expect is that Pak Lah would not act and behave the way he wanted him to be after he retired. Pak Lah would not be the Pu Yi who accepts an empress Dowager to instruct him from behind the curtain.

Now, he accused Najib for being a coward and a blind supporter of a ruling PM. And he blames Najib for supporting the decision to scrap the crooked bridge.

Now, he also challenge the legal fraternity on the compensation of ex-gratia to the 5-judges who were dismissed by him under complex surrounding circumstances that posed the legitimacy of the actions taken even where its content of justice reaches an intolerable level, and of which the law and the justiciability of the law had given way to a ‘false law’ to justice.

Though the actions to remove the 5-judges seems to be appropriate and politically effective, the legal norms lose their legal character and its legal validity when they are evidently unjust. That is extreme injustice when it is not in accordance with good law.

The attempt to destroy physically and materially certain parts of one’s own population, including judges and a former deputy prime minister, in accordance with abstruse criteria intolerably contradicts justice and so amounts to an extreme injustice. Here, we should accept that there was a core area of human rights such that harm to it amounts to extreme injustice.

Lon L. Fuller has this to say:

“To me there is nothing shocking in saying that a dictatorship which clothes itself with a tinsel of legal form can be so far depart from the morality of order, from the inner morality of law itself, that it ceases to be a legal system.”

Thus it is clear that an application of law which departs from the morality of order is a bad law and an evil order which in itself contradicts justice and so amounts to an extreme injustice.