Umno – the bane of Malays

Has Umno failed its founders and its mission to prepare Malays for the open world?

COMMENT

Umno alone is responsible for the regressive ideas of Malays. If they have been sleeping over eons, they now have been given sleeping pills to slumber along while the world passes them over.

Over the years, Umno leadership has caused the motivations and inspirations that moved an entire nation to degenerate into besieged paranoia and parochialism.

So before I go on, maybe it’s timely for me to remind Malay readers especially of what poet laureate Zaaba (Zainal Abidin Ahmad) said some time ago.

“I tell you not in mournful numbers

That the Malays are a dying race

I only want the soul that slumbers

To wake and work in these bright days

I tell you not in mournful numbers

The way in which to improve the Malays

I want that each Malay remember

Modest, contented shouldn’t be always.”

If I were to view objectively the clash between the world represented by Umno in 1946 and the new world represented by the Malayan Union, I would have to say things in the following manner.

Umno’s resistance and objection to the Malayan Union then was the result of the awareness of the Malay leadership in general – that Malays were not ready for the challenges of an open society.

Leaders with no interest in service

For that is what Malayan Union represented really – an open, competitive and democratic arrangement in the relations of the citizens of a modern world. Malays were not ready.

The mission of Umno then would have been only one – to prepare Malays to be ready for the open world. Equipped, competitive and having the tools to do so.

Umno’s mission was never to dig deeper into a trench and cocooned itself and Malays in general.

Umno can still embrace the founding principles behind the “betulkan orang Melayu” drive of Onn Jaafar.

He aspired to take Malays from the closed mind to openness, from debilitating traditionalism to modernism.

We could still expect these ideals that drove Umno 1946 to be refined and enhanced. Unfortunately, Umno has been taken over by a leadership of different material which is conditioned by different experiences, and having less service to the public motives in mind.

This may be a shocking admission, but it is a general perception of the Umno leadership that is getting stronger by the day.

Umno’s theory and the reality

The perception is that present-day Umno leadership consists of a bunch of sly politicians intent on making hay while it shines.

The gains from Umno’s original struggle are now hijacked and monopolised by the political elite.

The ordinary Malay man wants money in his hands so that he can determine how to apply it. The Umno mandarins want money to be entrusted to them to determine what is best for the ordinary folk.

We can see the increasing concentration of economic and political power in the hands of the elites instead of distribution to the rakyat.

Umno listens more to political intermediaries and lobbyists, who abrogate to themselves, an omnipotent wisdom to judge and interpret what the common man wants.

Obviously as the results (of the 2008 general election) showed, there is a huge crevice that separates theory from reality.
The common man does read in between the lines and is now capable of forming opinions and giving concrete expression to his opinions.

Spoils of war

Umno was once the empire, spanning its reaches into every nook and cranny of the country. It was born in 1946 on the resolve of the Malays to be architect of their own destiny.

It has been managed by an elite core in the form of a supreme council comprising a specific number of elected and anointed individuals chosen by the party and the president of the party.

We may very well call them the ruling clique overseeing the parcelling out not of real development but the spoils of war.

But like all empires, it is subject to the theory that “nothing lasts forever”.

On the other hand, if the theory is true, then the theory itself is not absolutely certain – therefore it too cannot rests on the qualification “forever”.

Something must have happened between 2004 and 2008 that made people reject Umno.

Perhaps it’s a question of leadership, perhaps it’s a question of conflicting interests between leaders and the rakyat.

The majority of the rakyat appears disillusioned with Umno and its policies. They are fed up with the Umno leadership.

I refuse to believe that this party founded on the trust, hopes and confidence of the Malays can no longer command the support of the Malays.

It must now regain the rakyat’s trust and faith. It has to re-engineer itself. The question now is, can it re-invent itself with the existing leadership?

The writer is a former Umno state assemblyman and a FMT columnist.