COMMENT Observers of historical ironies would find plenty to relish in the one that seems to be coming up on the back of Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak’s decision to empower a royal commission of inquiry (RCI) on the issue of illegal migrants given citizenship in Sabah.

This irony has to do with hypothetical developments, which if they eventuate, may well prove Tunku Abdul Rahman, founding prime minister of Malaysia and, more importantly, resuscitator of Umno in 1951 after the shock of party founder Onn Jaafar’s resignation, as a seer on the issue of Umno’s entry into Sabah.

By the same token, the same developments could prove Dr Mahathir Mohamad, the Tunku’s nemesis and incubator of a mutant Umno (‘Umno Baru’ was its assumed name) as guilty of destructive myopia.