Should we all get excited about Thaksin's return to his work place? Now, do we have a real acting prime minister or just a part-time CEO?

These are some of the questions I was asked as soon as Thaksin declared last Saturday he was staging a "comeback" on the pretext that the country simply faced too many problems that needed to be resolved.

Another reason he gave was he had at first thought the next election was only a few weeks away, but now it seems the wait will be much longer. In other words, Thaksin couldn't just spend the next few months shopping and playing golf.

But does his comeback change his lame-duck status? Not really. Can Thaksin, after all that has happened in the past few months, ever again be an effective leader? That looks increasingly doubtful. His credibility as a trusted politician has been seriously undermined. His ability to mobilise the country's best brains to pull us through our increasingly complicated economic troubles is virtually gone. Most seriously, the almost total disappearance of whatever semblance of moral authority he had left before the April 2 snap election is unsalvageable.

If Thaksin's ability to fix the economic woes confronting the Kingdom in his "only I know best" style has suddenly become obsolete, his political credibility has been thrown even more in doubt. He has become a political liability to the country, the very symbol of divisiveness. A politically weakened leader obviously can't produce economic miracles, however hard he may try to portray the illusion that the nation is badly in need of a guy with a magic wand.

What's more, if memory serves, Thaksin, even when he was at the top of his form - when he was seen as the "only game in town", so to speak - was never in a position to deal effectively with some of the major issues facing the country in the first place. Despite all of his tough talk and widely publicised posturing, Thaksin has never even come close to finding even partial solutions to the problems in the deep South. He seized on the flare-up of violence in Narathiwat province last weekend to announce his return to work only because the timing suited him.

Another reason cited by Thaksin for his comeback was that a group of women, claiming they had previously "reclaimed" their addict children because of the premier's tough anti-drug campaign, had petitioned him personally to return to work, because of a resurgence in drug-trafficking.

That, to say the least, sounds somewhat bizarre. Thaksin had earlier declared the crackdown a total success and that drug-trafficking was a thing of the past. He had even told us that as of a certain day of a certain month last year, there were no more illegal drugs to be found anywhere in the Kingdom. Now, he is being asked to come back because his promise never materialised after all? Or perhaps more to the point, the "total success" was never there in the first place?

On another front, do we really expect Thaksin to fix high oil prices? The last time, when he was in complete charge of the government, he resorted to that old trick of subsidising retail prices, declaring in no uncertain terms: "What goes up must come down. I have decided to use tax money to keep retail oil prices low, so that when the oil price comes down, as I'm sure it will, we can then return to profitability."

Most people believed him then. The PM was, of course, proved wrong. He droned on endlessly about energy-saving measures, but when Big Business was reluctant to go along with the government's measures, Thaksin immediately beat a retreat. And today, not one real, if painful, measure to save energy is in place.

Do we seriously think he can make unpopular but necessary decisions? Do we still believe he has the guts, management ability, credibility and moral authority to carry us through this crisis, which, lest we forget, was his very own creation in the first place?

Whatever spin he puts on his supposed comeback, Thaksin remains a political lame duck. Just before the snap election, he made a big splash of his pledge to put the country on the road to political reform. He promised not to take up the premiership while the nation was embarking on a political shake-up. He then went on an extended holiday as an "acting" prime minister. He has yet to answer all the relevant charges related to the serious conflicts of interests involving him, his family and his Cabinet.

Now, the lame duck says it can fly, and it's going to be a solo show, too. Wasn't it letting him do all those political acrobatics before that landed us in our current state of affairs?

Suthichai Yoon