“The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not.”

- Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

COMMENT | As reported in the press, the denizens of Putrajaya are in a funk as to whether to extend this emergency.

For a regime that is extremely sensitive to the label "back door government", Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin has done everything to prove that the Perikatan Nasional (PN) regime is an undemocratic force in this country and that they are deathly afraid of the will of the rakyat.

The problem with this emergency was that it was never a real emergency, to begin with. An “emergency” for those of us who lived through it, was a disruption of normalcy that had a profound effect on our daily lives.

This government has been so incompetent that it has made flip-flopping normal. These days if some ridiculous statement comes out of a minion from Putrajaya, the rakyat can be assured that there would be conflicting statements as the day progresses.

This emergency is a farce, which is rightly mocked by the average citizen who...