Former President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom has used his return to the Maldives today to criticise the current leadership of the Dhivehi Rayyithunge Party (DRP), instead playing up the recently formed Z-DRP faction of the country’s main opposition amidst ongoing internal disputes between certain members.
Speaking to assembled journalists at Male’ International Airport this afternoon, Gayoom was quoted by Haveeru as claiming that the Z-DRP – formed amidst increasingly bitter disputes between certain opposition MPs – served as a “reform movement” that promoted the true ideologies of the DRP.
Formed amidst an ongoing dispute between serving DRP leader Ahmed Thasmeen Ali and his predecessor Gayoom, the Z-DRP aims to represent the former national leader and his supporters.
The Z-DRP has been particularly critical of Thasmeen and his role in opposing the government of President Mohamed Nasheed, announcing earlier this week that it intended to put forward its own presidential candidate for the 2013 general election at a congress to be held next year.
The Z-DRP faction, which is linked to serving DRP MPs including Ahmed Mahlouf and its dismissed deputy leader Umar Naseer, has been conversely attacked by the heads of its parent party – the DRP – over claims its members have acted undemocratically and against regulations.
However, upon arriving in Male’ today on a flight from India, Gayoom said that amidst the ongoing factional infighting, he believed that the Z-DRP was the true spiritual successor to the party he formed and ran for five years from 2005. Gayoom did not comment on his own future presidential ambitions with the faction though.
“The real DRP is the faction that calls itself Zaeem DRP. It is an initiative that began to achieve the objectives that the party was founded on,” Haveeru reported Gayoom as saying. “The DRP recently took a turn towards another way; it took decisions against the charter and the Maldivian people observed [failure] from the DRP in taking its responsibility of holding the government accountable. The Maldivian people were disappointed with DRP.”
When questioned on his possible intentions to form an entirely new party, the former president said that the party was founded on democratic principles and therefore had room for members sharing different beliefs. He was reported to claim that he did not have any intention of forming a new party.
However, reconciliation between the DRP and its recently formed Gayoom supported-faction appeared unlikely earlier this week when serving party Deputy Leader Ibrahim ‘Mavota’ Shareef said legal action was being considered against the Z-DRP to an attempt to protect its name and logo.
Shareef claimed that the DRP council had given Thasmeen the authority to possibly seek court action against the Z-DRP members over claims they had infringed on the party’s own name, as well as potentially confusing voters over the party’s serving leadership.
He added that after repeated requests to try and require party members aligned to the Z-DRP to work within the main party’s constitution and avoid criticising and attacking its leadership, DRP party heads were now considering how to deal with what they see as dissent in the ranks
Shareef nonetheless denied that the announcement of a separate Z-DRP presidential candidate standing for election in 2013 would be a concern to the country’s main opposition party, claiming the public were now becoming used to democratic processes. However, he accepted that there was a danger that some people were becoming confused as to who the DRP’s leader actually was.
“I don’t believe [a Z-DRP presidential candidate] is a concern. After what will be five years of democracy in the country, I believe people are more aware and will not vote for people who are unable to follow their own party’s constitution,” he claimed. “I don’t think we have to fear about the impact of the Z-DRP.”
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Yikes. This guy has really gone crazy!! im serious!
Old man Maumoon has finally lost his marbles. Next he will claim that the real President is himself. This is all the mismanagement of this current government. Where is the specialist care for demented people in IGMH? This man should be getting treatment for his dementia and should not be allowed to give interviews. Shame on you President Nasheed 😛
Dear stupid MDP supporters....Don;t you guys see this crazy king Nasheed is going to tax , use our money to make MDP activits rich...Why are you guys supporting him?...Think of yourselves , Do you really want to give 15% of your salalries and from business profits to this corrupt yellow man,do you really want to pay a 5% VAT on everything you buy? Who's only aim now is to win the 2013 election?....Wake up people...By supporting MDP what do u get in return?..If i get 21 million from MDP i would support them too..But ppl who rents places in male'...the average middle class MDP supporter what is the matter with you people?...Remember there will come a day when it will be too late to remove him from power and we all will suffer...The president is a liar, He is selling you a lie...You are all being misled.
@ egon and maan.
Maumoon doesn't comment in disguise to make himeself satisfied. He is there playing out in the field against all his opponents. At the age of 70 plus. Are you jealous? Oh my are you jealous?
Your envy won't change what he stands for. There are reasons why he is still active in politics after a 30 year autocratic rule as your guys say. Why didn't he have the same fate as other rulers who ruled for such long. Please check the fate of long serving autocratic rulers of the world.
And please don't say that Maumoon is not tried because anni is hiythiri. Thats only a word he and anti maumoon people use to fool themselves and hide their weakness.
If after 2 and a half years you guys still can't get the reality into your sick brains I think you guys are crazy. Not Maumoon. Please help yourselves and meet a psychiatrist.
Do you guys really think a ganja addict who smoked and boozed all his life can arrest maumoon? Don't you know that Maumoon will have enough evidence against anni to knock him out of his throne if he dares to harm him out of the chart?Wake up guys. Maumoon is a smart politician.
Go suck you thumb pls.
hello Yaameen.I think there are more important and urgent matters in this country than jailing a demented fellow. For the first time I felt sorry for the man, especially Nasreena, yes the former first lady. She looked so old, tired, scared and frail in the pictures on haveeru. Don't bluff. If you have enough evidence on Mohamed Nasheed, you'd have thrown him in a wink.
and Nars, no matter how much you fret on face book and on this forum about 'king Anni' he's here to stay till the end of this term. So get over it. I have asked several people as to why you are so angry with 'king Anni'. Reason you didn't get to cut a deal.
Gayoom was forced out of DRP leadership by Thasmeen. Now Maumoon is taking revenge.
Nars, you really should get your info from a wider range of sources, not just DhiTv.
I am already paying taxes. In whatever form, govt revenue is tax. Money doesn't fall from the sky into the treasury. Currently I am paying the same tax as a consumer in the form of import duty as the richest men in this country. Please forgive me if I'd like Champa bros and Gasim to pay a bit more rather than spend all their money for anti-govt propaganda.
"By supporting MDP what do u get in return?..If i get 21 million from MDP i would support them too.." So we now know your asking price for prostituting yourself.
Poor guy! Someone please inform the authorities... call the mental asylum!
Thanks for getting Gayoom disappointed.
Maldivains were disappointed for 30 years during his ruthlessness..
Dear Peasant..Exactly my point..I belive income duty is a great indirect tax...Income taxes should be done away with and import duty should be reformed, and I also support VAT ...I support any tax that is applied uniformly across the income divide....You guys are so naive...when the govt increases our taxes..our hard owed money...This country will not become a european welfare state but rather would go the style of India, Nigeria or Haiti..Why ? bcs the country is mismanaged big time...Our money would be given into MDP thugs in the form of contracts and the poor will get poorer while the rich get richer....In a democracy the rich and poor should be treated the same...
Nars- you still haven't explained why the poor should pay as much as the rich, that is unfair.
And no, you being rich is not an excuse. Since our money is going to "MDP thugs" aka the elected govt- then why not take more form the rich and less from the poor?
Nars on Sat, 14th May 2011 8:11 PM you wrote -
"do you really want to pay a 5% VAT on everything you buy?"
Nars on Sun, 15th May 2011 6:05 AM you wrote-
"Import duty should be reformed, and I also support VAT"
And then you said -
"I support any tax that is applied uniformly across the income divide…"
and in the same comment -
"the poor will get poorer while the rich get richer…." "
"In a democracy the rich and poor should be treated the same…"
So the question to you is-
Other than make us lose our hair in trying to make sense of your nonsense, what is your rationale in making a comment here?
Whats next, Zedey is still the "real" president of Maldives. Come on. Get a life Zedey.
Who the F- - - is Maumoon to comment on DRP? a stubbon selfcentered guy trying to get in to Presidential office at any cost does not have the right to speak in such a manner regarding DRP. Go to Hell with your Zaeem DRP crowd.
Maumoon's grandiose, ego-maniacal narcisism seems routed in the old, Be'fulhu culture of Maldives, which many seem to have adopted. This culture is vain, and is destructive to true humanitarianism. If I was a Maldivian, I imagine I would be a Wahabbi, no doubt about it, as I would use whatever vehicle I could think of to express my hatred towards the destructive core of this culture. Please let me elaborate why I think this. I don't think you guys are going to like this much, but it is going to be said.
When speaking of myself, if I use my name rather than say I (is it called referring to yourself in the first person or third person???) it is considered a symptom of narcisism in the Western world. For example, if instead of saying 'I went to the park' if I would say Ben went to the park I would be considered to be displaying sysmptoms of narcisism (vanity, excessive self love to the point of lacking empathy for those around me...) Yet when I hear Maldivians from the upper classes speak Dhivehi, I often hear people speaking of themselves in the first person, not I did this or I did that, but 'Jack did this and Jack did that' (Jack is an imaginary Maldivian with an English name because if I used an Arabic name as an example, someone may have thought I was targetting them.)
At first I assumed that this was cultural and unrelated to Western psychology and its list of common narcisistic symptoms. Yet, as I have observed the behaviour of these Maldivians, their is something fundamentally vain, power hungry and lacking in empathy about them.
So, if you want to escape all this greed, vanity, fighting and bitterness, this culture has to be replaced through the excercise of caring, and through, discipline.
I mean, Maumoon may preach to people about being kind, generous etc... yet he himself has to demonstrate that by discontinuing to refer to himself with grand sounding titles like Zaeem. I know Zaeem only means leader in Arabic, but it cannot be denied that it has a ring about it of some kind of God-like status to ears which are not used to Arabic as their first language. Maumoon knows this, he knows that his followers think his being Zaeem makes him sound like some kind of God like figure, he loves it!
Stop it!
@Nars: I agree with you completely. I am not a very strong supporter of Qayyoom, but with all those taxes been introduced, I can very well imagine how poor we all would be in future. The average maldivian would not bear to cope with his daily cost of living. Maldivians already do not earn that much to pay taxes to the government.
@ Ziyan
Have you ever wondered how other countries manage to furnish their citizens with proper health care, quality schooling, reliable public infrastructure and the likes?
Peasant....What i meant was VAT is fair bcs it is taken from the rich and the poor, and it gives the seller to increase the price by 5% so that it is passed on to the consumer ...Even if i buy a Gucci bag or someone buys a cigarette he has to pay 5% vat..fair enough...But income tax, if someone makes less than 30,000 per month and his profits less than 500,000 per year he has to pay no taxes...Now that is very unfair...Fair is even if someone earns 1000 a month make him still pay 15% income tax...why should only the workers of this country suffer to make life easy for lazy people.
Now i would support no taxes....and any party that would decrease the tax i would give them my vote....No to taxes, No stealing our money and giving to MDP corrupt cronies...Stop playing Robbin Hood and his merry thieves...
I agree with Ben.
We should stop calling him Zaeem.
He doesn't deserve to be called Zaeem. He is such a self cetred maniac.
I will call him "Mr. Zedey".
I was shocked to see the huge crowd to welcome Zaeem.. All I know is that he's the only Maldivian to get the majourity of the Maldivians. Anii got 25% he got 45%...
this country is one to the south Asia's richest countries and we should all thank maumoon for it..
But why does everyone never appreciate the work he has done for us. we maldivian always say bad things bend the back..
For a fact we all know some will benefit and some will lose in this life. Can't we face the facts that everyone cannot get everything.
But on the other hands anni also doing the same as that.. but he much worst then everyone else. I have seen world leaders but not as crazy as anni. He is following the routes to killing us all and our nation
The country is run by the people - indirectly. They elect govt of their choice after studying their future schemes and portfolios. I live here, eat here, breathe here and also expect certain facilities from the govt. For this, I have to pay certain taxes - nothing wrong in that.
What is Maumoon's contribution to this country? Nothing. Did he do anything to make Maldives famous in International Foras' - again nothing. Who brought 'extremism' in this country - Maumoon. Becoz of Maumoon, some Maldivians start believing that they have Arabic roots.
Maumoon's contribution to the country is NOTHING. He lost defamation case against Miadhu Editor Latheef who had published a report of New York Times about how much Gayoom & his family members have had looted.
Maumoon should be thankful that his successor is Anni who did not seek revenge as was done by various other Maldivian successors. Maumoon should be thankful that he is roaming free, speaking free - otherwise he should have been ...... for what he did during his autocratic 30-year rule.
Zeenat, I think you have some personal issue against maumoon that is why you saying this.
Its is good to pay taxes. But anni is putting too much on the poor people and i would rather support anyone accept anni and his thugs
Abdul Gayoom is a Dictator. New Reality - There is no place for a Dictator. See what is happening in Tunisia , Egypt , Libya ....