It is PM, not Health DG, who should resign, Chong tells Tiong
KUCHING: Democratic Action Party (DAP) Sarawak chairman Chong Chieng Jen has called upon Bintulu MP Datuk Seri Tiong King Sing to ‘get his senses right’ by getting the Prime Minister as the one who should resign, and not the Health director-general (DG) Tan Sri Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah.
Chong said the right person to resign should not be the Health DG, but Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin and his failed Federal Cabinet tasked with the responsibility of making the national policies in the fight against Covid-19.
He described Tiong’s statement calling for the resignation of Dr Noor Hisham as ‘barking at the wrong tree’.
Chong, who is Stampin MP, said if Tiong was truly out to make the culprit for the prolonged sufferings of the people accountable, he should be calling for the resignation of the Prime Minister.
“Instead, he and his gang of GPS (Gabungan Parti Sarawak) leaders and members of Parliament have resolved to continue supporting the failed Perikatan Nasional (PN)-led federal government.
“It is absurd that when the government has failed to contain the spread of the virus, instead of the ministers and the Prime Minister resigning, the minister who’s in charge of the National Security Council (NSC) gets a promotion to becoming the Deputy Prime Minister (DPM) and all the other ministers responsible for the failure to contain the spread of the virus get to keep their ministerial posts. There’s a total lack of accountability in the PN government’s administration. The PN government’s failures are evident, in that after more than one month of Movement Control Order (MCO) 3.0, we hit the record high of 9,353 new infected cases on July 10. After more than one year of intermittent MCOs and spending billions of the people’s money, the government has failed to increase the capacity of our medical facilities to cater to the need of treating the severe Covid cases,” he said.
Chong said the purpose of MCO was to flatten the curve so as to give the government time to increase the medical facilities and manpower to tackle the outbreak of the pandemic; instead, the country’s medical services now are still struggling and on the brink of breaking down because of the high cases.
“Besides that, the cries and sufferings of the business sectors are not properly taken care of.
“Many businesses have gone under or are on the verge of going under and yet, the government is only giving very superficial assistance,” he added.
Apart from that, he said the standard operating procedures (SOP) had been totally ineffective, illogical and confusing, which opened the people and the business sectors to unreasonable compounds while failing to contain the spread of Covid-19.
“While the people are losing jobs or having much reduced income, the law enforcers are having a field day issuing compound notices based on their own arbitrary interpretation of the confusing SOP.
“Ultimately, one year and five months after the PN government took over, Malaysia is now classified by the Bloomberg opinion editorial as a country ‘Staggering down the Road to Failed Statehood’,” he said.
Therefore, Chong added, Tiong should need no reminder that Muhyiddin and his PN government had been able to mess the whole country up because of the GPS’ strong and unfailing support.
“Despite all the mess created after the one year and five months’ rule, all the lives unnecessarily lost to Covid19, the terrible disruption to our economy and the total disregard to the sufferings of the people and the trampling over our fundamental rights of parliamentary democracy, the GPS continues to fully support the PN government.
“I urge Tiong not to try to cover up for the failure of the PN government and the wrongs of the GPS in supporting this failed government by making such a ridiculous and unreasonable call for the resignation of (Dr) Noor Hisham and wrongly pushing the blame of the PN government on him.
“It is the Prime Minister, his ministers and the GPS who are the true culprits of the mess that we are in,” he stressed.