Secret narrative written on the back of Yameen’s portrait

Across every era, an indisputable truth endures: Dr. Mohamed Muizzu climbed his way into the highest office purely by standing atop the shoulders of Abdulla Yameen Abdul Gayoom. His victory was driven by far more than that theatrically staged vacant seat; it was built on relentless flattery and an unending stream of worship.

As an obedient minister inside Yameen’s own cabinet, Muizzu enthusiastically celebrated the feats of that regime. Even when stepping forward as the substitute candidate following Yameen’s disqualification, he passionately insisted that a statesman of Yameen’s unmatched brilliance would never walk the earth again.

He painted that government as the ultimate bastion of fairness and lawful order. To hammer home that staged grief over his mentor’s forced absence, a vacant chair took center stage at every rally, while Yameen’s portrait loomed far larger on election boards than the faces of Muizzu or his running mate.

Those massive likenesses were deliberately engineered to sell a precise fairy tale to the electorate.

Dismissing dictatorship as pure fiction

While Muizzu was busy selling this heroic image, ordinary citizens and political rivals were tearing Yameen’s track record to shreds. Their outrage targeted a reign marked by despotic brutality and the wholesale decay of the judicial system.

They pointed directly to the systematic jailing of every significant political opponent and that infamous, unthinkable night when security forces ripped open the roof of the apex court to haul away sitting magistrates.

Back then, the collective ranks of the coalition, with Muizzu front and center, brushed off those damning grievances as completely fabricated lies.

Throughout the subsequent administration, Muizzu and his followers even swarmed the perimeter of the apex court in protest, loudly declaring that this supposedly righteous statesman had been targeted with an illegitimate and religiously forbidden judgment.

Tearing down the sacred altar

However, the man occupying the presidency today has completely morphed.

In a spectacular twist, Muizzu has started preaching the exact horror stories he once waved away as partisan myths. The very person who once dismissed those accounts is now personally stripping bare the toxic machinery of the Yameen era.

That same loyalist who once decried the criminal ruling against Yameen as a fabricated travesty of justice is now spinning a completely contradictory yarn.

Selective heartbreak and revisionist history

Reflecting upon those historical episodes of court tampering, magisterial coercion, and the physical siege of the highest bench, Muizzu suddenly claims he watched with his own eyes as former leader Maumoon Abdul Gayoom and top judges sat locked behind bars. He now dramatically frames those sights as an agonizing, heartbreaking memory.

However, when those very abuses were actively unfolding, he never wavered from his seat in Yameen’s cabinet, actively applauding every single one of those heavy-handed measures. This same individual, who stood shoulder to shoulder with the regime throughout that whole dark chapter, now self-righteously insists that anyone who illegally trampled on civil rights or stole public wealth must face a thorough and lawful inquiry, declaring that allowing them to walk free would make a mockery of true justice.

Tossing the martyr in the trash

Back when the broad public took to the streets in fury against Yameen, Muizzu acted as his fiercest shield. It was Muizzu who personally dismissed every single accusation and criminal judgment tied to the state tourism leasing embezzlement, the most colossal financial scandal ever documented across the archipelago.

Throughout the complete race for the top office, his most repeated vow was to obliterate that supposedly forbidden verdict and liberate Yameen from confinement.

Securing Yameen’s absolute freedom stood as an indispensable cornerstone of his whole bid for power.

Flipping the canvas to show the rot

At the end of the day, the fairy tale Muizzu exploited to grab the presidency was manufactured while cowering beneath the shadow of his mentor’s colossal banners.

The spectacle playing out before us is merely the cynical reality he kept concealed on the flip side of that canvas all along. There is no point in dressing this up as shifting priorities, hypocrisy, or the natural demands of a changing political climate.

His genuine character is finally stepping into the harsh light of day. The hidden script scrawled across the reverse of that portrait is at last being recited for everyone to hear. Every tearful pledge made before that image was nothing but a cheap vehicle to capture the crown.

Now, hungry to consolidate his reign, he is casually presenting the ugly underside. The game is completely transparent, and the hollow theater has finally run its course.