Anything But Umno

Ali Kadir
The Malaysian Insider
Sep 10, 2011

SEPT 10 — Raja Petra Kamarudin (RPK), the blogger, is right. We don’t know if Pakatan Rakyat will be able to govern our beloved country responsibly or walk the talk.

But we do know that they will not be worse than the plundering and blundering hordes of Umno. I say Umno and not BN because in reality the BN component parties such as the MCA, MIC, etc are subsidiaries of Umno. They may have a different flag, motto and even president but their mission statement is to be subservient to Umno.

The elections are around the corner. How do we know that? Simple, the clamour for allocations and funds is getting louder in Umno. Soon, we will be asked to make a choice and by my reckoning the choice is clear: Anything But Umno.

Just let us examine what these Umno types have done to our country. I have no doubt that the likes of Tunku Abdul Rahman, Tun Dr Ismail, Hussein Onn, Tan Siew Sin were men of integrity and served the rakyat.

But from the Mahathir era onwards it has been looting, corruption and using race and religion to divide Malaysians. We are sliding down a slippery slope in this country and we have a choice to either go with the flow and do nothing or change the direction of this country.

Please don’t expect Najib Razak and Umno to do anything. Najib is too weak-willed to ever be a reformer, and plus he seems to be caught by institutional paralysis. What he or any Umno president of late is doing is governing the country for the party and its crony capitalists.

It is an open secret that the biometric scanning system deal benefited an Umno minister, the son-in-law of a top Umno leader and businessmen close to Putrajaya.

And now we are told of the secret plan to privatise IWK by 1MDB and Puncak Niaga. So secret that even the minister in charge did not know about it.

As reported in The Malaysian Insider, this deal was given the greenlight by the Economic Council. Then you have the PM saying that a good portion of MRT contracts will be set aside for Bumiputera contractors.

This is an euphemism for Umno warlords and contractors connected to the party.

The plundering does not stop there. National Service camps are given to Umno politicians and their supporters and smaller contracts are farmed out to Class F contractors, nearly 90 per cent of them Umno members.

The government-sanctioned looting has reached such a crazy stage that members of the inner circle of PM and supporters linked to Muhyiddin Yassin are fighting over the economic largesse.

I have not even touched on the notoriety of the First Family and their friends and hangers-on. Some people may think that excesses are okay as long as the economy is growing.

Well, it is not and nothing can justify expensive shopping trips or diamond rings in a country where many still find it hard to make ends meet.

Malaysia must be the only country in the world besides Zimbabwe where a top government official can remain in his job despite facing countless allegations which strike at the core of the man’s honesty. The man in question is the Attorney-General Gani Patail.

He has been accused of fabricating evidence, of hiding corruption cases involving Umno politicians and every dastardly act by a former senior police officer.

The correct thing for the government to do would be to set up an inquiry and examine if the allegations are true. This man is after all the top legal officer. Instead the Najib administration just keeps silent and ignores all this incriminating evidence.

We can only surmise that Gani Patail has enough to sink Umno dulu, kini dan selamanya. Just like probably VK Lingam knew too much that he could not be charged with subverting justice by trying to influence in the appointing of judges and just like how Tajudin Ramli knows enough about the backroom deals to warrant the government asking GLCs to stop litigation against him.

Honestly, I can’t think of a period when race relations have been worse than now and a large part of blame has to be directed at Umno for its divide-and-rule policy.

When it feels threatened as it does now, it plays the Malay race card, warning of some imaginary threat to Malay political power. When the party is in this mode, everyone who is not of the same thinking and religion is an enemy. How do you build a united country with this thinking?

Like a number of Malaysians, I always thought that Abdullah Ahmad Badawi was a decent chap but who was ill-equipped to lead Malaysia. But the Wikileaks exposure on his sister-in-law’s US$400 million (RM1.2 billion) cargo aircraft deal and the report that Umno guys get 30 per cent commission on defence deals just tell us how systemic the rot is.

Given this track record, it has to be Anything But Umno.