Did we not consider Norway's model of a Heritage Fund
Could we have anticipated or pre-empted the current situation. After all, the authorities were fully aware that our Oil reserves may not last till 2010, given the current rate of consumption.
Today the Norwegian Petroleum Trust is the world’s second largest sovereign fund, and fast expanding. It may have already exceeded half a trillion (500 billion) dollars. When the oil wells run dry, as they inevitably will, the Norwegians could still enjoy their present lifestyles as the Trust Fund’s income could cover the country’s budget till perpetuity.
It was indeed dissapointing for a senior statesman like Mahathir to succumb to racial rhetorics, at this juncture of the nation's economic and political situation.
A drowning man, will almost always bring down anyone that came near him, as he cluthces at anything to keep him afloat.
Yes, this is Malaysia, and every down and out politician will make one last dive to his personal political fountain of youth.
Malik Imtiaz made a good case here
Excerpt follows :
Though I am loath to say it, Tun Dr Mahathir has crossed the line. I recognize that he is fully entitled to act in the interests of UMNO. However his invoking of race and his equally dangerous incitement of racial fears directly threaten our existence and our future. His assertion that the Malays will suffer for the fact of non-Malays gaining political power is both unsubstantiated and dangerously misleading. No non-Malay politicians are challenging the status of the Malays. The Federal Constitution guarantees their protected status and there is a glaring absence of any discussion of an amendment to the Constitution. In the same vein, the call for a more equitable method of affirmative action can only be beneficial to the Malay community, a community that, despite the many years of the NEP and its successor policies, many of those under the stewardship of Tun Dr Mahathir himself, is still afflicted by poverty. This sad state of affairs is indisputable and has even prompted calls for reassessment by Malay opinion leaders.
Ahmad Mustafa Hassan was spot on, with his analysis of the fools that run this country. Where everthing is treated as joke.
We take the ‘UMNO’ general assembly as a case in point. Due to lack of positive brain power, the ‘kris’ was used as a symbol of manhood and courage. After this show of socalled belligerence, the stand up comic, Hishamuddin Tun Hussein Onn would then take over the proceedings of the assembly.E ach speaker would try to outdo the other in coming out with hilarious and so-called witty comments and flattering pantuns.The leadership was entertained and so were the other participants. Serious talkers would be out of place in such a gathering.
And finally, Raja Petra on Mahathir (now aptly named the "Thorn in UMNO's flesh who have removed itself by Musa Hitam)
It must unnerve Mahathir that those whom he’d defeated have all bounced back. The impeached, sacked and suspended judges of 1988, recently rehabilitated, are public heroes, he the remembered villain.
The Malay Rulers have asserted their power more strenuously than at any time since 1984, his fight with them forgotten in an Umno chorus to rally the Malays around their rulers. For Mahathir, indeed, ‘Umno is no longer respected by the Malay Rulers.’
His old Team B foes – Razaleigh and Abdullah, and Tun Musa Hitam – are respectively active politicians and an elder statesman, he a cantankerous Old Man, or, as Musa described him, a ‘thorn in Umno’s flesh’ that had voluntarily removed itself.
Sabah, whose regionalist dissent he quashed, and whose peninsula-styled Umno-dominated politics he imposed, is again restive but now holds the key to Umno’s survival in power. Even the mass media pour scorn on him, he whose words and pictures they’d slavishly used to adorn their front pages, once upon a time in Malaysia
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