Just a timely reminder, to myself as well as all my fellows who yearn for Malaysia to be rid of its cancerous ruling regime, not to get so carried away by possible hopes of improvement as to mistake them for a cure.

Let us be deeply suspicious, for example, of current attempts by one of the primary causes of the Umno/BN scourge, former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad, to pose as our rescuer from its ravages.

As I have recalled many times before, he long ago abandoned his practice of medicine, and with it his sworn Hippocratic duty to ‘do no harm to the patient,’ in favour of a career in hypocritical power-mongering.

A field in which he has done a great deal of harm indeed to the Malaysian body politic, and in the process cost the Malaysian people not only most of their rights and freedoms, but also countless billions of ringgit.

And thus Mahathir has never been less Hippocratic and more hypocritical than in his current attempts to pose as saviour of the nation from the very same virulent strains of corruption and criminality that rendered his 22 years in office so dire.

Who does he think he is kidding with his pretence that he’s now on a mission of mercy to save Malaysia from his current hand-picked successor, Najib Abdul Razak?

It is perfectly plain to all the world that Najib is just one of the many monsters that Mahathir himself strove so long and so hard to create in his own image, Dr Frankenstein-style.

Or, in other words, Najib is just a symptom of the pathological system that Mahathir is responsible for, and to this day continues to personify in his nepotistic determination to pave a path to the eventual premiership for the son who followed him into politics, Mukhriz.

It is also clearly apparent to us all, though Mahathir of course would deny or pretend to have forgotten this, that the massive alleged corruption for which he insists Najib must be sacked is no more serious than the RM600 million ‘rescue’ during his own rule of a heavily-indebted shipping line owned by another of Mahathir’s own sons.

And we further recall, as Mahathir apparently doesn’t, that the current 1MDB and RM2.6 billion ‘donation’ scandals for which he is so viciously condemning Najib are no worse than many if not most of the countless other flagrant rip-offs of public money over which Mahathir presided.

So, all in all, it seems very suspicious indeed that the doctor now conveniently claims in old age to have mutated into such a benign organism as to justify his decision that Najib is such an intolerable germ that he ‘must go.’

There Mahathir sat just yesterday with former deputy prime minister Muhyiddin Yassin and lots of other Umno/BN microbes who have apparently magically mutated from pathological to people-friendly since their expulsion from positions of power, leading them in posing for all the world like genuine critics and opponents of the diseased regime in general, and of Najib in particular.

No willingness to confess, repent or apologise

I can’t speak for you, of course, but I wouldn’t trust any Umno/BN mutant for a moment. None of them, from Mahathir on down, has ever shown the slightest sign of willingness to confess to, repent or apologise for their crimes, let alone to repay the financial proceeds of their misdeeds.

And even that the supreme Umno/BN mutant of them all, Anwar Ibrahim, despite years of ill-treatment or outright torment by Mahathir and the rest of his former partners in political pathology, has, while repeatedly declaring the regime ‘corrupt to the core,’ has been strangely shy about producing details of specific crimes or evidence against those who committed them.

In short, it seems to me that all those who have been infected with the Umno/BN virus, even if they now claim to be cured, are or at least should be assumed to be carriers, and thus for the future health of Malaysia should be quarantined, if necessary in jail.

And as for those who haven’t yet owned-up to the fact that they are toxic, they should be, as Mahathir so rightly if self-interestedly prescribes, removed from office forthwith.

Not singly and selectively, however, as Mahathir and his fellow mutants are urging in the case of Najib, as that would be as futile as trying to fight a fast-metastasising cancer one cell at a time.

No, the only way to rid Malaysia of the cancer and curse of Umno/BN is swift surgical removal of the entire main malignancy, plus rigorous follow-up therapy to ensure that no mutant cells survive to threaten the health or the very survival of Malaysia, ever again.

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’.