Najib, Hannah Yeoh welcome PM’s resignation using rain and shine analogy

Amid the avalanche of sympathy messages which greeted Muhyiddin Yassin’s resignation speech today, two politicians who had been pressing for his removal appeared to have struck similar chords in welcoming the collapse of the Perikatan Nasional government.

Former prime minister Najib Razak and DAP’s Segambut MP Hannah Yeoh both turned to weather analogies as news spread that Muhyiddin had informed the Yang di-Pertuan Agong of his decision to resign.

Najib, who alongside Umno president Ahmad Zahid Hamidi was said to have engineered the withdrawal of support from 15 MPs for Muhyiddin, posted several lines expressing confidence that the country’s situation would improve.

“Rain pours down on the earth; After the rain, there will be a rainbow; After darkness, there must be a ray of light.

“After hardship, there will be happiness; May God bless Malaysia and the people,” Najib said in an Instagram post about an hour after it emerged that the Agong had accepted Muhyiddin’s resignation.

Yeoh meanwhile took to Twitter with a similar theme in expressing optimism of better days to come.

“After the rain, comes the blue sky. Declaring peace, healing and prosperity over you Malaysia,” she said on Twitter.

Muhyiddin’s resignation came days after opposition parties dismissed his offer of a cross-party consensus in exchange for their support in an upcoming confidence vote.

In a speech later, Muhyiddin said it was clear that he no longer commanded the majority support following the rejection of his offer, as well as the withdrawal of support from the 15 Umno MPs.

“I will never conspire with a kleptocratic group,” he said, in an apparent reference to Najib, who was convicted last year of seven charges related to the misappropriation of RM42 million from a company linked to 1MDB.

In 2017, the US attorney-general described the 1MDB scandal as “kleptocracy at its worst”, after the Department of Justice filed lawsuits to seize more than US$1.7 billion in assets believed to have been stolen from 1MDB, which was set up by Najib as a sovereign fund.