THE stain of the last general election (GE) has finally rubbed completely off my pointing finger. Despite all the frequent Covid-era hand-washing, it took two months for the indelible election ink to disappear. 

Forty-eight days is a long time for ink to stay on your body, but hardly enough time for the newly formed government to warm their seats. 

Ministers are still doing PR-friendly spot checks in their areas of operations. The Transport Minister has fixed our train station escalators in record time. The Sports Minister has fixed the seemingly insoluble sogg y pitch at Bukit Jalil, and the Food Minister has brought millions of eggs to the market. 

While the Prime Minister (PM), well what can we say about PMX Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim without gushing over his different style of administration, his down-to-earth manner and his get-go spirit for people to think they can just tell him problems, no complaint too small. 

After the train wreck of the last five years, with three different PMs, most of us are ready to reconcile and get this country back on its tracks with Anwar and his unity government, warts and all. 

We want to look forward to a dull, routine unexciting government that can just function normally for five years. Businesses want a predictable environment to plan for what is expected to be a turbulent climate globally. 

Professionals just want to get their jobs done with as little government as possible, something that Anwar has promised, and nine-to-five working stiffs just want to go to work, be upwardly mobile at minimum-wage rate and have family time during balik kampung seasons. 

Outwardly, the signs are there that things are normal under a government that is, at last, looking at what it can do for the people. 

Yes, even if convicted thief (Datuk Seri Mohd) Najib (Razak) is now appealing to a higher power than Malaysia’s apex court to escape his graft conviction via the United Nations and the Deputy 

PM is still accountable to his own trial, we can look forward to the mundane things like posting our most listened songs of 2022 on Spotify despite no one else caring. 

Yet, while we settle down to survive 2023, the political vultures that opted to stay out of the Anwar- led government are circling around the carcass of the 15th GE (GE15), hoping to pick up some rotten gains and threatening to disrupt our plans. 

The reluctant Opposition leader has frequently hinted that things are moving behind the scenes to mount another attempt to come back to power via the side-door. 

My friend, whose life expectancy dropped when the Internet was invented, finally quit holding his hopes for a peaceful, productive and, more importantly, full five-year term for this newly elected government. 

Mind you, he has the attention span of a TikToker, but he takes his cues from interactions on social media and has all the anxieties of a six-year-old on a sugar high. 

He is, what the professional therapist would call, suffering from Chicken Little Syndrome and would be alarmed at the drop of a hat, hence Malaysia’s Twitterverse is a bad place for him to live. 

He shows me a picture. He tells me that it is a picture taken in London showing one of the losers of GE15 having dinner at a restaurant. He showed me another picture of the same person, outside the restaurant wearing baggy pants and a cotton cap. 

“What do you make of this?” He asked. 

“It’s a picture of someone eating on holiday,” I said. 

“No, my friend, it’s the beginning of the London Move,” he said. I tend to not take anyone over 70 wearing MC Hammer pants and peaky blinder hat too seriously, but maybe there’s no smoke without fire.

I also take a very sceptical approach to rumours, but then again this friend of mine was one of the first to smell something fishy about 1MDB (1Malaysia Development Bhd) before anyone else knew who Jho Low was. 

It’s all over the rumour mill that plans are afoot that another “move” is being nefariously planned. Ironically, the word “move” entered our lexicon from the granddaddy of all moves, the Kajang Move in 2013 in an attempt to install Anwar as Selangor Mentri Besar. 

Since then we have, of course, the infamous Sheraton Move in 2020 that displaced the Pakatan Harapan government and started this whole mess of takeovers. 

Since this is Malaysia and all rumours are untrue until they become true, I will not lose too much sleep over this. But if it is true and they are plotting to reverse our lives again, I wish the pox on them all. — pic MUHD AMIN NAHARUL

• ZB Othman is the editor at The Malaysian Reserve.

• This article first appeared in The Malaysian Reserve weekly print edition