COMMENT | Just as I predicted in the first paragraph of my new book ‘GE14: The Big Issues’: “Malaysia’s 14th general election will no doubt be fought between a Barisan Nasional coalition that boasts its sixty years of 'stable rule' and a Pakatan Harapan coalition calling on the electorate to “save Malaysia” from the BN’s kleptocracy.

"There will certainly be plenty of the usual mudslinging on both sides and Malaysian voters will likely be treated to tirades about current scandals including 1MDB, as well as past scandals such as the forex losses, now that the former prime minister has joined the opposition…!”

It is great that Pakatan Harapan will be going around the country to expose the BN’s 1MDB scandal.

The rakyat who do not already know about this scandal will get to know about how more than RM40 billion of our sovereign wealth has been squandered by the coalition that has run this country since Independence.

Equally wonderful is the fact that the Barisan Nasional will be going to town about the more than RM30 billion forex losses incurred by Mahathir’s government during the nineties.

The old man may even get a taste of what incarceration feels like if he is found to have misguided the cabinet and Parliament in the nineties and squandered so much of our valuable assets.

If Mahathir had not joined the Pakatan Harapan coalition, Harapan would only have been tainted with the corruption charges against the chief minister in Penang and the allegations of corruption by Harapan themselves against the former menteri besar of Selangor.

Worse luck, thinking they had roped in a big fish to trawl for rural Malay votes, Harapan must now bear the cross for the former kleptocrat’s sins.

It never fails to amuse me that the laws of karma work in such a way that ensures that justice will always prevail, even in what too often appears to be so unjust a world.

Who would have thought that two decades after the Mahathir administration had frittered away more than RM30 billion of Malaysian taxpayers’ money in the forex losses, we would finally have a Royal Commission of Inquiry into this scandal which Lim Kit Siang described thus:

“Up to now, the government has failed to 'come clean' on the colossal Bank Negara forex losses as a result of speculation in the international currency markets from 1992-1994, with the losses cited as ranging from RM10 billion to RM30 billion…The reasons which I had advanced in Parliament in 1994 for a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the colossal Bank Negara forex losses remain valid today and should be the terms of reference of a White Paper…

"To determine the actual extent of the colossal forex losses suffered by Bank Negara 1992-1994; whether there had been any financial malpractices and abuses in view of the inconsistencies and conflicting explanations about the colossal forex losses, and establish how Bank Negara could incur such colossal losses.”

I imagine Lim must be so pleased that his call for an RCI in 1994 has finally come to pass. Now at least the rakyat will be able to get to the bottom of this seemingly bottomless pit of financial squandering under the Mahathir regime...