Published on: Thursday, April 09, 2009 |
Kuala Lumpur: Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak will announce the new Cabinet line-up at 3pm Thursday, said a statement from the Prime Minister's Office.
It said Najib will have an audience with the Yang di-Pertuan Agong, Tuanku Mizan Zainal Abidin, at 11am to seek His Majesty's consent on the line-up.
The statement also said that the ministers and deputy ministers will take their oaths of office, loyalty and secrecy at 9.30am on Friday at the Istana Negara.
The announcement of the new Cabinet line-up, coming in the wake of Najib's appointment as the new Prime Minister on April 3, will be broadcast live by local television stations.
"Some of them (Ministers hoping to be reappointed) even if they underwent ritual cleansing with lime juice and flowers will still be unfit for the Cabinet," wrote blogger A Kadir Jasin (kadirjasin.blogspot.com), a former chief editor at the pro-government New Straits Times.
Failure to deliver on the Cabinet promise could weaken Najib's authority, complicating his job of winning support for radical reforms to help the export-dependent country fend off its worst recession since the 1998 Asian financial crisis.
Najib has made managing Malaysia's way out of the global economic downturn a cornerstone of his policy and recently unveiled a 60 billion ($16.71 billion) spending boost.
Although Najib has said he wants to reduce Malaysia's dependence on commodity exports and electronics, the Malaysian currency has traded lower along with its regional peers rather than posting any gains on the prospect of reforms.
It has fallen 4.83 per cent this year against the dollar, making it the second-worst performer in emerging Asia after the Korean won. The ringgit was sold off on Wednesday to 3.627 to the dollar, moving in line with weaker sentiment in the Asian region.
There is a risk of underperformance relative to its peers should the political situation worsen. Data from Malaysia's central bank on Tuesday showed foreign exchange reserves had fallen $38 billion from their peak to $87.8 billion.
"Elevated political risk, yesterday's report that Bank Negara Malaysia lost $3.3 billion of foreign exchange reserves in March and the impending depreciation in the Singapore dollar nominal effective exchange rate policy band lead us to recommend long dollar/ringgit," ING economist Tim Condon said in a report, Wednesday.
Long dollar means selling the ringgit currency, which operates in a managed float against other currencies.
Backbiting and sniping are never far from the surface in Umno and the re-emergence of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia's former PM of 22 years who helped oust Najib's predecessor Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, could prove to be another millstone.
Mahathir rejoined Umno on Saturday after quitting last year in protest against Abdullah. On the stump for Umno and the Barisan Nasional in the by-elections, he again took the opportunity to savage Abdullah.
While Najib has repeatedly asked for time to prove himself and to be judged on his actions rather than perceptions of him, he is unlikely to get much of a political break.
The parliamentary vote in Perak illustrated the dangers to Najib from the three-party opposition, comprising an Islamist party, an ethnic Chinese party and Anwar's reformists.
The Pan-Malaysian Islamist Party (PAS) saw its majority in the seat rise to 2,789 votes from 1,566 votes because it managed to appeal to the party's core Malay base better than UMNO and at the same time attracted ethnic Chinese voters.
Tensions between PAS and the Democratic Action Party (DAP) are never far from the surface. The ethnic Chinese DAP fears their allies' insistence on setting up an Islamic state.
"It (Perak) has strengthened the opposition People's Alliance in that the extremes (PAS and the DAP) are now coming closer together," said Welsh from Johns Hopkins.
