COMMENT | When the prime minister criticised those who took him to task for accepting Najib Abdul Razak’s apology with no acknowledgement of guilt, he used a term which I have not known him to use before, “father of the nation”, when referring to himself.

“When someone tenders an apology, don’t tell me I should reject it? What sort of behaviour is this? I’m the prime minister… ‘father of the nation’… when someone apologises, what else should I say? So, I just said I welcome it,” Berita Harian reported Anwar Ibrahim as saying two days ago.

That hits at the heart of the leadership crisis the country faces today, the origins of which go back to the formation of Umno in 1946 and was demonstrated from the time of independence in 1957, over and over again.

This is the feudal and patriarchal attitude that has shaped Malaysia’s policies over the years, with one man’s vision for the nation at each change of leadership overtaking everything else in the belief that the “father” knows best what the nation needs.