MP SPEAKS | Umno, Bersatu, and PAS have failed to form a stable government as the "Malay unity" rhetoric has proved to be a false promise for Malaysia.
If I had made this statement, it would be taken as proof of the allegation that I am anti-Malay and anti-Islam, but this was stated by Warisan president and former Sabah chief minister Shafie Apdal at the recent Regional Outlook Forum 2021, hosted by the Iseas-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore last Thursday.
Shafie said Malaysian politics needs a reset in 2021 and beyond as the Malay unity rhetoric is proven to be a false promise.
He said: “Umno, Bersatu, and PAS have failed to form a stable government.
“About 70 percent of Malays are urban and 80 percent of Malaysians are urban. But Umno, PAS, and Bersatu are still working on the basis of the majority of Malays being rural. They will soon find a revolt of urban Malays who would return to the kampung to vote.”
The Semporna MP said a new Malaysia narrative is needed across the country’s key pillars – political, economic, and social – everything from governance to accountability, education, technology, healthcare, and social mobility.
“There is no place left for racial and religious politics – unity needs to be the bedrock for reform, through participatory democracy, one which is fully represented across key stakeholders – old and young, urban and rural, liberals and conservatives, through a values-based system of governance which transcends race and religion.
“Malaysians will have to decide on our own political future, we have to go through this difficult but worthy struggle to graduate from old ideas to fresh new ones to forge a Malaysian nation to face the post-2020 era.”
Shafie’s words are timely if we are not to experience the catastrophic developments in Malaysian nation-building like what is happening in the United States where, at Washington’s Capitol Hill, the outgoing US President Donald Trump’s mob stormed the US Capitol in Washington during the joint session of US Congress to certify the election of Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States.
Trump had spent two months subverting democracy by denying his election loss and spent four years shredding truth and inflaming cultural and racial divides for political gain.
In Malaysia, politics had been poisoned for decades by incendiary lies and falsehoods that DAP is communist, anti-Malay, anti-Islam, and anti-Malay rulers, and for the 22 months of Pakatan Harapan's federal government, this campaign of disinformation had been intensified polarising the Malaysian nation as it was designed to create the false impression that Malay rights, dignity, position, and the future of Islam faced unprecedented peril.
Umno, Bersatu, and PAS are now locked in a “three-kingdom” tussle of plots and counter-plots, which Umno leaders want to be resolved as early as possible before its strength vis-à-vis the other two parties are further diluted.
Umno President Ahmad Zahid Hamidi has said that his party would field candidates in all parliamentary and state seats that Umno won at the 2008 general election. If so, three Bersatu Ministers and two Deputy Ministers would have no seats to contest.
But this will not be the bottom line of Umno demands for the 15th General Election as the pressure would be for Umno to contest in most of the parliamentary seats it contested in the 14th general election – except for the seats won by PAS. This would pave the way for the crushing and even the disappearance of Bersatu.
The 11-month Perikatan Nasional (PN) government has seen Malaysia returning to the trajectory of kleptocracy, kakistocracy, and a failed state.
In its quest to regain power in Putrajaya, Umno leaders, like Trump, have ignored the greatest peril facing the nation and the world – the Covid-19 pandemic.
Worldwide, the Covid-19 pandemic has passed the 90 million-cases mark, with over 1.94 million fatalities while Malaysia has registered a cumulative total of 135,992 Covid-19 cases and 551 fatalities, overtaking both China and Myanmar and set to overtake the Philippines.
It was precisely this selfish and short-term pursuit of politics in the Sheraton Move conspiracy which caused the second and third waves of the Covid-19 pandemic in Malaysia, the latter surging to a nightmarish peak.
Malaysians have not seen the light at the end of the tunnel of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The answer is for the restoration of the mandate to Pakatan Harapan and with Anwar Ibrahim as the ninth Prime Minister, Malaysia can start fulfilling its aspiration to be a united, harmonious, multi-racial, world-class, great nation, where there is democracy, good governance, rule of law, respect for human rights and the environment, and “a beacon of light in a disturbed and distracted world”.
We will not only get out of the trajectory of a kleptocracy, kakistocracy, and a failed state but win the war against the Covid-19 pandemic.
LIM KIT SIANG is the DAP MP for Iskandar Puteri. - Mkini
The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of MMKtT.
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