If I were the Prime Minister, I couldn't sleep at night. I couldn’t even drive to nearby convenience stores because my head is full of worrying imaginations of how the people would react if I pick those human beings to be my cabinet members.
To me, personally, postponing the first parliamentary session of the year was not made without a serious purpose.
You can’t compare that postponement to your long-planned candlelight dinner being suddenly delayed by your girlfriend through an iMessage.
Even on Twitter, I had tweeted that the postponement of the parliamentary session is important because of these reasons:
Firstly, there are no ministers and deputies in the newly-created government.
Let say the cabinet was formed last Tuesday or Wednesday, and the initially-scheduled parliamentary session remained, it would unpleasantly cause an inefficiency to ministers and deputies to digest their ministries’ issues, policies and whatever is important in a very short time.
Secondly, Muhyiddin Yassin is a well-experienced politician, and of course, he won’t let anyone of his cabinet members be a “school textbook reader” when it comes to answering questions in the House of Representatives, especially ones asked by the oppressive opposition parliamentarians.
A well-organised government is what, I think, the Prime Minister is busily preparing in the case of the delayed parliamentary session.
With the Perikatan Nasional government was just formed, even though the coalition is still unofficial, its captain has to be decisive and precise in selecting who are the best to be sitting on the vacant minister chairs.
As one of the concerned Malaysians who wishes that the future cabinet will be full of hopeful realists, I hope that the Prime Minister will utilise every minute of his present solely-led administration by having regular face-to-face discussions with prolific corporate men and professionals, regardless of their industrial backgrounds, to listen to their ideas and proposals that could be taken up by the government as national agendas.
For now, besides meeting with the heads of ministries and their important agencies, it’s good for Yang Amat Berhormat Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin to personally see corporate figures or “heroes of the industries” to delve what they have in their minds.
If their ideas are realistic and executable in the short and long run, the Prime Minister has an absolute power to appoint anyone of them to be filling the job vacancies in the federal cabinet.
It’s time to make a true difference, or “reform” like Anwar Ibrahim always says, by selecting clever brains with applauded contributions to be the full ministers for at least five to six ministries with the likes of finance, economic affairs, entrepreneur and cooperative development, energy-science-technology-environment-climate change, international trade-industry and health.
It will be historically unprecedented if these five ministries could be headed by politicians as a deputy minister while the ministerships are held by politically-independent professionals—corporate boss, successful rural entrepreneur, scientists or environmentalist, export-import tycoon with excellently-audited yearly revenues and even surgeon from a best local hospital.
Oh yea, speaking of surgeon as a candidate to be the new health minister, I wonder who would the majority really choose between the beloved partisan Dr Dzulkefly Ahmad and a doctor who has cured hundreds of patients since the first day he or she was called “Doctor”?
* Amerul Azry Abdul Aziz is an independent writer who now views politics as something that can be researched.
**The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the position of Astro AWANI.
