• 
• 
• 

And Najib Razak, the prime minister-elect of Malaysia, who has been called "prime minister-in-waiting" as the deputy prime minister under Badawi, will not take office until March.

You, on the other hand, will become the 27th prime minister of Thailand on the day this column is printed. It should not matter that a shotgun wedding to very strange bedfellows put you in your seat. The Khmer three-party resistance coalition against the Vietnamese occupation in the 1980s represented even odder bedmates. If Prince Norodom Sihanouk and the Khmer Rouge could join together for a common cause, then nobody should raise eyebrows at your kaleidoscopic coalition.

Unlike Obama or Razak, who have ample time to build credible teams, you have to come up with one in haste and out of political expedience. Your team will look like the motley crew on Christopher Columbus' three ships, but you are no Columbus. That chameleon could lie through his teeth to save the day and his skin.

You are one of the very few career politicians who are considered unblemished by corruption. It is a breath of fresh air that the country's overall corruption index - a compilation by Transparency International - stands at 3.5 out of the full 10 points.

Everybody agrees that your challenges are daunting and almost insurmountable. The country has been torn into so many pieces and is in such deep kimchi that healing will take time. And time is a luxury we do not have. The world financial crisis is worsening by the day, with no sign of bottoming out. If the external setting is not bad enough, the internal milieu makes it worse. The closure of the airports that resulted in massive losses in tourism, export opportunities, and investors' confidence added salt to the wounds, and the country is in an economic straightjacket. The yellow shirts have gone home for now, but the red shirts are out on the streets. The rule of law has been violated repeatedly and the mob mentality may become no-holds-barred in the foreseeable future. Bad precedents have been set; violence and unrest tend to breed more of the same.

Facing at once the triple crises of economic recession, negative overseas perception and national disunity, Thailand is at the fork in the road. Your leadership can determine the country's fortunes.

Handy is your Oxford background in economics and I should not waste your time on that matter other than borrowing Sarah Palin's gibberish. It is all about job creation and job security, with everything that that takes and entails. You might want to consider assembling a team of economic advisers from the private sector - the Warren Buffets and the Bob Rubins of Thailand. They know how to turn profits. And profit, as long as it's not a synonym for crony capitalism, is not a dirty word when the country's economic growth for the first and second quarters of 2009 is projected to be only 1% at best. There have been attempts to create such a council, but rarely has any concrete policy come from such an assembly. Populist policies are not a bad idea, and it should not be the trademark of the leadership before you. You will have very little money left in the government coffers. But the 23rd prime minister faced a similar struggle when he took office after the 1997 crisis. He managed to trade horses without the horse, and the market went on its way to a speedy recovery.

From the overseas perception, your foreign policy team must be impartial, capable and professional to regain lost international respect and confidence. A team that comprises divisive and vengeful figures will only worsen Thailand's standing.

With more than two decades in politics, you know there is always going to be a feeding frenzy in the press in which inaccuracies get repeated until they become facts. You also know that news reports reflect the views of those who have the ears of the writers.

As for national reconciliation, your political acumen and audacity will be needed. Divisiveness has permeated every strata of our society like never before; even street vendors who have stalls side by side fight like cat and dog when it comes to politics. Your ability to overcome this challenge will become your legacy. A national healing will mark a new dawn for our civil society, and failure to reach it could lead the country to the same fate as Timbuktu - a poor and desolate place in the parched African desert that lives on memories and remnants of its glorious past.

In the US, the Watergate scandal put the country in a political and psychological shambles. Nixon was the only president in recent memory to be impeached while in office. The day President Ford pardoned him was the day the country began to heal. Ford's decision was hugely unpopular, but in the end, history treated him well. Without his political courage to do the right thing for the country at his own political expense, America's woes would have dragged on far too long.

It is wrong to go for broke when it comes to settling political differences, as few are lily-white. There has been enough hatred; it must be allowed no more. For those vindictive ones who only want to seek vengeance, I would simply recite this timeless passage from the Bible: "Let he who is without sin, cast the first stone."

It is said that you were a compromiser growing up. I hope you have not lost that trait. It will give the country the best chance to mend its wounds. Maybe too much pressure and unrealistic expectation are being placed upon your shoulders, but people are pinning their hopes on you. We wish you the wisdom and political wherewithal to do the right thing.