Surely the most laughable incident in this typically ludicrous week in Barisan Nasional’s Malaysia was Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak’s pledge to donate his organs .

This latest ploy to save his political skin was enough to make one’s head spin.

With a flurry of questions, the most obvious of which is whether his organ donation pledge has any more truth in it than the flagrantly false Election Integrity Pledge he signed before he gerrymandered, lied, stole and bribed himself and his Umno/BN accomplices back into office in 2013.

Similarly bleeding obvious is the question of why on earth he would try and divert attention from the ongoing scandal surrounding the RM2.6 ‘donation’ he allegedly received from some Middle Eastern benefactor by using the very word ‘donation’?

And presuming that he has pledged his organs only when he is finished with them, or in other words after his death, why would he so encourage us all to hope he gets to make his donation(s) as soon as he possibly arrange it?

Not, I hasten to add, that many of us actually look forward to his demise any time in the immediate future, as the longer he hangs around disgracing the country, the more damage he does to his clearly and deservedly doomed regime.

A less dire question than Najib’s demise, but just as obvious, is whether there’s anyone in Malaysia or anywhere else that could stomach the thought of being the recipient of any of his organs, as given his age and the extent to which he’s abused at least some of them, like his lying tongue, for example, they could hardly be in anything like donatable condition.

But to my mind the most burning question of all that Najib raised by pledging himself as an organ donor and calling for others to follow his heart-warming example was inspired by his alleged rationale that ‘pledging to be an organ donor can save lives’.

Since when, I found myself wondering, has Najib been even slightly interested in saving any life but his own? He even apparently considers the lives of his accomplices and supporters expendable, in light of repeated urgings for them to defend Putrajaya to the death.

And he has demonstrated precious little if any personal or political will to either save or seek justice for the countless lives lost at the hands of his regime, as in high-profile cases like those of Altantuya Shaariibuu and Teoh Beng Hock through the hundreds of victims of police killings in custody and fake shoot-outs.

Far, far more loss of life

Nor has Najib or any other member of his criminal and incompetent regime ever shown any sign of caring or remorse for the fact that, as many killings as the police commit, there is far, far more loss of life that they idly and corruptly permit.

Through the almost total failure of Najib, his regime and its police force to give a damn about enforcing Malaysia’s traffic rules, lives are lost on Malaysian roads at not just twice or three times, but 10 times the rates of such professionally-policed nations as the UK, US, New Zealand and Australia.

As for how many Malaysian lives are lost or at least shortened, especially among very young and old, to the haze of smoke that has annually choked Malaysia for at least the past 20 years, of course government figures are shrouded in mystery, or rather secrecy.

Because, despite Najib’s finally making a show of urging Indonesia to do something about the smoke from fires deliberately set by palm-oil planters in Sumatra, he knows very well, as you and I long have, that many of the companies involved are owned and operated by members or cronies of the Umno/BN regime, and thus politically untouchable.

As politically untouchable, in fact, as Taib ‘The Termite’ Mahmud, who, for the benefit of himself, his family and cronies, has spent 40 years raping the forests and despoiling the lives of their traditional native inhabitants of Sarawak and laundering the proceeds in Canada, Australia and elsewhere.

A fact that brings us to the further point arising from Najib’s claim that his donation pledge is an effort to save lives, which is that the tragedy of his and Umno/BN’s eternal rule is not just all the lives lost, but the many, many more that are in some way or another blighted.

Poisoned by the regime’s racism and religionism; stupefied by its relentlessly lying propaganda; stultified by its politicised education system; and repressed to the point of paralysis by constant fear of selective illegal prosecution.

This latter fate most infamously still being suffered, without any discernible sign of ongoing public protest, by the man who for many years has personified the hopes of the regime’s opponents, Anwar Ibrahim.

In short, as far as I’m concerned, Najib should keep his confounded organs for and to himself, and if he is determined to make a donation to the nation of which he claims to be prime minister, he should give it back its organisations. Like a police force, judiciary, mainstream press and every other civil institution he and his predecessors and present-day accomplices have appropriated.

Plus, of course, all the untold billions he and his fellow criminals have allegedly stolen in cash and resources.

DEAN JOHNS, after many years in Asia, currently lives with his Malaysian-born wife and daughter in Sydney, where he coaches and mentors writers and authors and practises as a writing therapist. Published books of his columns for Malaysiakini include ‘Mad about Malaysia', ‘Even Madder about Malaysia', ‘Missing Malaysia', ‘1Malaysia.con’ and ‘Malaysia Mania’.