Buy, buy and bye bye, BN

Has BN bought enough votes to ‘win' this coming Sunday's so-called ‘election'? Or to put the question another way, are there still enough Malaysians so moronic, masochistic and morally-bankrupt as to stand for this criminal regime's attempt to bribe them yet again with their own money?

I very much doubt it. In fact, I think enough Malaysians are finally convinced, as I've been for years and have recently been repeating until I reached the lucky eighth time, that BN must be destroyed.

In its efforts to turn this election into an elauction by bidding up the bribery to ever-dizzier heights, I hope and trust that the regime has finally sealed its own long-awaited and well-deserved doom.

Of course I realise that here in Malaysiakini I'm preaching to the converted, and that there are still plenty of others that BN has profoundly - if not permanently - perverted.

But even with some of these, the proverbial penny has started to drop that they're selling out on the cheap. According to Dr Bridget Welsh, caretaker Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak has splashed out more than RM58 billion in public money over the past four years to try and buy his regime for one more term. But that's chicken-feed compared with the hundreds of billions that BN and its cronies have stolen and salted away for themselves.

Or as a commenter on a recent Malaysiakini story brilliantly expressed this thought, it's like BN has hijacked your car and stolen your cash, then ‘generously' given you back some of your own small change so you'll be ‘grateful' to be able to pay your bus fare home.

Meanwhile, BN billionaires like Abdul ‘The Termite' Taib Mahmud, Mirzan Mahathir and all the rest ride high on the hog and immune from investigation of their murky affairs, and 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) - over which Najib Abdul Razak has control - has allegedly salted away RM7 billion in a secret account in the Cayman Islands.

'Complaining and doing nothing'

But everyone has been aware of BN's record of financial plunder for decades, without ever getting up the gumption to do anything about it but sit around coffeeshops complaining.

Until recently, that is, when the National Feedlot Corporation (NFC) scandal appeared to especially excite public scorn and protest. And of course, the spectre of the earlier Scorpene submarines ‘commission' scandal and the associated murder of Mongolian translator Altantuya Shaariibuu has also continued to haunt BN in general, and Najib Abdul Razak himself specifically.

Haunted but undaunted, however, Najib goes on and on with his spending spree, splurging public money on buying himself and his partners-in-crime more time.

And time is what the whole gang of them deserve. Not time in government, however, but in jail. Though the regime claims that every single one of its candidates in the upcoming election have been vetted and declared ‘clean' by the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC), I'll wager not one of them would survive an honest, professional tax audit or forensic investigation.

As I've said many times before, this is not a political coalition as it may once have been - it's an organised crime syndicate. And its cronies and sycophants in the police force, judiciary and ‘mainstream' media are accomplices in or accessories to its countless offences.

Even this ‘election' is in itself a crime, or a whole complex of crimes on BN's part, from its unconstitutional and otherwise illegal gerrymandering of electoral boundaries and stacking of the electoral rolls, to its monopoly of the print and air media and the plundering of public money for ruling-party campaign funds and outright voter bribery.

Last week, Najib was having a wonderful time joking that Anwar Ibrahim's campaign jingle ‘Madu dan Racun' which likens Pakatan Rakyat to honey and BN to poison, actually meant that "opposition promises are like poisonous honey."

Thus leading many of us to observe that it's not Anwar's poisonous honey that the rakyat has good reason to be afraid of, but Najib's poisonous money.

Poisonous to Najib and his BN regime, that is, as everybody knows it is public money, and thus not only bleeding the rakyat to death, but dangerously blowing out Malaysia's national debt.

Lest you start imagining I'm as obsessed with money as Najib and his BN conies however, let me say that the most compelling of all reasons why BN must and I trust will be destroyed this May 5 is what this robber regime has cost Malaysia in what no amount of money can buy.

'BN owes us lives'

The lives of dozens, if not hundreds of people killed in conflict with and in the custody of its police and MACC, for a start. No amount of money, public or otherwise, can repay these people or their surviving relatives for the fact that most of these people have never been accorded any respect by BN, let alone the justice of proper investigations of their deaths or punishment for their killers.

Then there have been the deaths in the custody of former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad and his successors of Malaysia's formerly admirable justice and education systems, excellent and efficient civil services and free, independent media.

In short, BN owes Malaysia and Malaysians a monumental - if not insurmountable - debt in terms of not only stolen cash, land, timber and countless other commodities, but also in terms of death and the destruction of civil liberties and protections.

And no amount of more stolen public money given out as ‘election gifts' will save Najib and his current regime, including the apparently immortal Dr Mahathir, from finally paying the price.

BN must be destroyed. Now, this Sunday May 5, 2013. Not by and by, and not delayed by another day, let alone another five years. Both despite and in defiance of Najib's corrupt attempts to buy, buy this election, now is the time for Malaysia to bid him and BN bye bye.

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'.