Najib has unfinished business in Parliament, says Kit Siang

DAP leader says the RCI report on illegals, White Paper on IS and mounting criticism on 1MDB still not addressed by Najib.

KUALA LUMPUR: Parliament will be adjourned next Thursday until March next year without Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak perhaps attending to three unfinished matters.

DAP’s elder statesman Lim Kit Siang, who sounded this note of caution in his latest blog posting, identified the three matters as the report on the Royal Commission on Illegal Immigrants in Sabah (RCIIIS); a White Paper on the Islamic State; and a Ministerial statement on the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) and its subsidiaries.

The RCI Report, pointed out Lim who is also DAP Parliamentary Leader and Gelang Patah MP, is meant to end once-and-for-all the 40-year problem of illegal immigrants in Sabah which had multiplied 15 to 19 times in four decades from 100,000 in the 70s to 1.5 million to 1.9 million at present.

“If the Report, presented to the Federal Government on May 14, is not presented to Parliament next week for a full parliamentary debate, it could only mean one thing – that there is complete absence of political will to resolve the long-standing problem of illegal immigrants in Sabah,” said Lim.

“It would also mean that the Royal Commission of Inquiry was just a Barisan Nasional (BN) electoral ruse for the 13th General Election in May 2013 to secure votes for BN from the people of Sabah, and for which it succeeded.”

The Joseph Pairin Kitingan Review Committee for the RCI Report announced by Najib in Kota Kinabalu last week, alleged Lim, is just the latest “merry-go-round” sleight-of-hand to kick the problem of illegal immigrants of Sabah into a distant and indefinite future, while the problem snowballs to pass the two million mark for illegal immigrants in Sabah, thereby reducing the Orang Asal to a minority status in their own land.

The White Paper on the Islamic State, stressed Lim, had acquired greater poignancy and urgency with two latest developments:

• Malaysia shooting up to the Top 50 countries in the Global Terrorism Index 2014, when we should be one of the 40 countries in the world with no terrorism problems; and

• The arrest of a man and two women by the police counter-terrorism division on Saturday for alleged involvement with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Isis).

Najib should also make a Ministerial statement “on the roiling multi-billion ringgit 1MDB scandal”, continued Lim, “and demonstrate that he is not trying to shut down public query and even parliamentary debate on the latest financial scandal by the threat of legal suit against the Petaling Jaya Utara MP Tony Pua.

“Najib should not shoot the messenger just because of Tony’s message demanding full accountability and transparency about the 1MDB scandal,” said Lim.

He called for the establishment of a bipartisan Parliamentary Select Committee on 1MDB “to ensure that there was no hanky-panky or impropriety in the government endorsement and involvement in 1MDB activities”.