These days, a lot of the international press are focusing on our country because a transition of power is going to happen soon. Normally, they would report on the following:

a. What to look forward to with the new leadership;

b. How can the new leadership save Malaysia from the global economic recession; and

c. The credentials and credibility of our new leadership to raise the confidence of international investors.

But they are not focussing on all this. Instead, our country was put in great embarrassment with all the negative perception, unproven scandals and allegations surrounding our new leadership.

While the international press is debating about the future of our country with its new leaders having such a heavy baggage, on our very own press and new leaders have decided to keep mum about the questions raised.

With our judiciary, MACC, civil service and police appearing to be heavily biased, you just can't blame the whole world from starting to believe that those allegations are true as there are so many contradictions in how all these allegations are being handled in our country.

This is further fueled by our leaders’ inability to face the allegations head on. None of these issues were raised and debated during the recently concluded Umno general assembly.

Their new leaders, just like the party’s disciplinary board, failed to take advantage of this great opportunity to show the rakyat they are the party for all Malaysians despite being a Malay party. Not one member raised the question of credibility and challenged our incoming leaders to explain themselves to the audience on why they deserve to be our leaders.

As they are aware, for the past 50 years, the Umno leader usually will be the leader of the country as well. But very unfortunately, not one Umno member took the responsibility as a rakyat to try and put their new leaders in the hot seat so that they (the leaders) could have taken the opportunity to repair their integrity and credentials in the eyes of the rakyat.

To be fair to our incoming PM, no matter how much allegations the opposition and international press hurl at him, they will just remains mere allegations until he is proven guilty in a court of law.

Then again, besides the above, what makes the mass majority think that the new Umno president is not suitable to be our PM? This is because to date, he has yet to give the rakyat a new hope that a new dawn is coming; that there will be good days ahead.

Sadly, the rakyat is feeling quite the opposite instead in that with him as the leader; they believe they are in for a long, dark night.

The rakyat remembered so well the feeling they had when Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad announced his resignation as PM and that he would pass the baton to Pak Lah. Pak Lah was still viewed as ‘Mr Clean’ at that time.

The hope was that the whole country was going to progress well with less corruption under Pak Lah and this gave every Malaysian an inspiration to believe there was a better future to look forward to.

We were that hopeful that the days of corruption would be over as ‘Mr Clean’ would be in charge to sweep it all out. That inspiration and the high hope of a clean and improved civil service drove all Malaysian wild, and yes, we did and we gave BN a thumping majority in Parliament in 2004.

That is the kind of inspiration an incoming PM should bring to the rakyat - even more in these tiring times. The incoming PM must be able to bring new hope to the people to assure the people that their days of hardship are going to be history.

Also, he must show that he is someone credible that we can rely on. Unfortunately to date, our incoming PM has yet to be able to do just that.

To face the economic storm effectively, the rakyat needs to be rejuvenated again. Without a motivated and supportive rakyat, the country will further regress – regress faster in fact as this will hamper the plans that the government has put in place, no matter how well-intended. The support of the rakyat is essential for a government to be effective.

When you can't inspire and raise the motivation of the rakyat to trust and be supportive of the present government, then that is good enough a reason to prove that you are not suitable to lead the country.