Datuk Seri Najib Razak gestures as he speaks to the audience at Majlis Santai bersama Najib at PWTC in Kuala Lumpur November 3, 2018. — Picture by Ham Abu Bakar

COMMENTARY, Nov 10 — Since he was voted out, former prime minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak has been generously critiquing the new Pakatan Harapan (PH) government’s policies, contrasting these with when his Barisan Nasional (BN) still held federal power.

In his latest musings, he tells voters he was about to expand the BR1M scheme to include those earning up to RM5,000 monthly, claiming he would have set aside RM10 billion for the direct cash aid had he been the one to present Budget 2019 instead of Lim Guan Eng.

He goes on to criticise PH for reducing the cash aid as well as for repealing his Goods and Services Tax (GST) in favour of the Sales and Services Tax (SST), which he notes has not resulted in immediately lower prices.

He also criticises PH for not honouring some of its election pledges, such as the promise to abolish tolls, provide free education and insanely cheap petrol.

Najib is right; PH broke those promises and even admitted that it never thought it would be in a position to have to deliver them.

But what he misses — intentionally or otherwise — is what his former Youth chief Khairy Jamaluddin told him bluntly: “We lost because of 1MDB. The end.”

It seems 1MDB is the elephant in the room for nobody except Najib and possibly those with the intelligence of a root vegetable.

With the 1MDB scandal now laid bare, it is preposterous for Najib to continue pretending as though the general election was won and lost purely on “lies and slander” as he still insists.

If there are lies, then they must only be the ones that he continues to tell himself. Everyone else, including his former friends in Umno and Utusan Malaysia, has since woken up to the smell of coffee.

Not all the 1MDB chickens have come home to roost, but it is patently clear that Malaysians made the right choice in the general election as far as the multi-billion corruption scandal is concerned.

Whether or not it costs voters in terms of perks, goodies and benefits is another matter, but the country could not continue with the blatant fraud that took place in the name of 1MDB.

We still don’t know how much the scandal is set to cost Malaysia and Malaysians, but if it is just some broken promises and a few years of recovery, it will have been worth it.

And if it costs us more, then we all know who to blame.