No offence intended here to the vast majority of people suffering mental illness.

Especially in light of the possibility that I might already unwittingly be one of them, or else soon could be considering what a prime candidate my advanced age makes me for senile dementia.

In any case, both compassion and political correctness forbid making fun of us ordinary, everyday citizens who suffer the misfortune of losing our memories or minds.

But if we were to become so mentally incompetent as to convince ourselves that we were fit and proper candidates to head this or any other country, surely nobody would take us seriously.

In fact former compassion for our cerebral confusion would turn to condemnation, and political correctness to political directness, and we’d not only be laughed to scorn, but locked-up for our own and others’ safety.

As, to get to the point promised by the headline of this piece, it is painfully clear that lots of current and would-be world leaders should be.

Ever since the evidently eminently sensible Barack Obama famously told an interviewer that he considered a great many of the heads of state he had met to be “insane”, I’ve been keeping my eye out for nut-cases in charge of nations.

Not that some are hard to spot. Perhaps the most obvious being the ‘glorious leader’ of North Korea, Kim Jong-un. Or, if you prefer, Kim Jong-unhinged, whose latest act of homicidal mania has been to order the execution of the head of his education ministry by anti-aircraft gunfire for falling asleep in a meeting that his hare-brained boss was chairing.

On second thoughts, let’s make that ‘hair-brained’, as foolish follicular fashion seems to be a common symptom of loony-leadership syndrome.

Witness the brutally short-back-and-sides style topped with a kind of mad-cap bouffant that simultaneously characterises and caricatures the latest carrier of the Kim dynasty’s notorious insanity gene.

And that amazing masterpiece or rather monstrosity of the hairdressing arts that the doolally would-be US president Donald Trump persists on wearing despite the fact that, shades of Tricky Dick Nixon’s suspicious-looking five-o’clock shadow, it makes him look like the Tricky Dickhead he is.

Trichological signs of head-of-state insanity aren’t confined to the scalp, of course. The most memorable example of this being megalomaniacal Adolph Hitler’s bizarre below-the-nostrils moustache, since aped, for whatever addled reason, by the deranged dictator of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe.

Meanwhile, Mugabe himself has gone so mugaga that he regularly reads the wrong speech on those increasingly rare occasions on which his Zanu-PF minders let him out loose to ramble on in public.

Russia’s most notoriously murderous ruling madman, Stalin, famously sported a somewhat maniacal moustache, too, as readers as elderly as yours truly will recall.

Though, in stark contradiction of the strange hair theory I’ve been expounding, Stalin’s Chinese contemporary and fellow loony leader, Mao or more accurately Mad Tse Tung, favoured the bald look for his head and countenance, perhaps the better to showcase the physical feature that most effectively proclaimed him as a blot on the face of China, a giant wart on his chin.

But having strayed into the historical, let me get back to the here-and-now. To the batty Bashir al-Assad of Syria, for example, the leader or rather bleeder so power-crazed that he has responded to peaceful popular demonstrations against him and his rotten regime with a five-year war on his country and the majority of its citizens.

Sparking a spate of killings

Then there is the raving-mad Rodrigo Duterte, recently elected President of the Philippines on a promise to wage war on drug peddlers and users and thus sparked a spate of killings.

Though considering the levels of crime and corruption in the Philippines and many other loco locations in South-East Asia, nobody in his or her right mind could help wondering whether this is actually a covert war by politically-connected drug lords and their police accomplices and enforcers against their civilian criminal competitors.

In other words, it is difficult if not impossible to tell whether the Dutartes of the world are mad or bad or both.

An observation that applies to many of the world’s apparently loony leaders, not least the Prime or, as is widely suspected, Crime Minister of Malaysia, Najib Abdul Razak.

Long before he bought his way into the top job, Najib was allegedly exhibiting ominous signs of such insanities as narcissism, megalomania and kleptomania, not to mention pathological lying.

But ever since he was definitively revealed as a major beneficiary if not the mastermind of the multi-billion-dollar 1MDB fraud, albeit identified only as Malaysian Official 1, he’s been acting more and more like Madlaysian Official 1.

Apparently lost in some fantasy world in which everyone will finally come to believe his lies and accept his denials and forget the whole matter.

But, though his Madlaysian cabinet ministers and sundry accomplices in and accessories before and after the fact of the 1MDB fraud and countless other regime-related crimes are still madly ranting and raving in defence and apparent support of him, he’s crazy if he imagines they won’t dump him in a second to save their own skins.

Even Najib seems vaguely aware of this in the dim recesses of his power- and money-mad mind, and has mentioned the possibility of retiring to do some gardening.

If only this dream could come true for not only Najib, but also for every other criminally loony national leader still currently at large, and that the garden in question could be enclosed in a special-purpose, high-security asylum.

It’s a thought that makes very good sense. For one thing it would mean that the untold millions of victims of misrule by these nutcases would be saved the heartache, expense and danger of seeking asylum in alternative countries led by comparatively sane people.

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’.