A monolithic organisation is, by definition, slow to change. This description fits Umno like a glove. As it lumbered into its 59th annual party conference, the collective mood of the general assembly was much less confident than it had ever been in its history.
There was really nothing to celebrate, certainly not the succession of Datuk Seri Najib Razak with all that huge and unsavoury media attention he is attracting internationally. Even here in Malaysia, where standards of public morality and ethics are much less vigorously applied to those in high office, there is a real feeling of queasiness and unease that Najib appears to be so cavalier about the critical need to clear his name against what he protests are unsubstantiated allegations of impropriety.
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It is not for want of trying but, for the life of me, I find it difficult to take the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission’s self-trumpeted independence seriously. Since its much hyped up launch just weeks ago, its chief commissioner, Datuk Seri Ahmad Said Hamdan, has managed to put his mouth into overdrive while shifting his brains into reverse on at least two occasions. The F1 television advertisement has obviously got through to me at last.
The first was when he claimed that there was “good and strong evidence” against the Pakatan Rakyat menteri besar of Selangor, Tan Sri Khalid Ibrahim even before the MACC investigation into the “car and cows” saga had got into first gear.
More recently, he was again at his favourite game of shooting his mouth and, not content with that, he succeeded in shooting himself in the foot as well when he declared, to the chagrin and utter disbelief of us all, that there were “elements of misuse of power” in the case involving the Perak assembly speaker, V.Sivakumar. This was over the suspension of the “other” menteri besar Datuk Dr. Zambry Abdul Kadir and his six assembly men.
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Zaid Ibrahim is one person I greatly admire because he, no matter what the subject is under discussion, is ready to take it on with courage and candour.
Zaid is his own man, beholden to no one as far as I know, and is not out there in the public domain to please his political masters because clearly he has none.
In my conversations with him over the last few months on a range of political issues, I have noticed, much to my surprise and delight, that he is apparently incapable of harbouring any malice, not even towards people who have acted malevolently against him.
Such is the measure of Zaid the man who now finds himself maliciously attacked on all sides by the besieged Umno/BN cabal because he had the moral and intellectual courage to suggest to His Majesty the Agong that a person such as Najib whose personal reputation is in complete tatters should be told in the nicest possible way where to get off the gravy train.
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Najib Abdul Razak will be remembered as the most controversial prime ministerial aspirant this nation has ever known. The deadweight political baggage he is lugging around, as he sets his course on what he fervently hopes will be the last lap to the best address in the country, is enough to make a grown man cry, but not Najib, the single minded man of destiny according to his wife, Rosmah.
He seems to take his travails in his stride. Is he not, again, according to Rosmah, predestined to occupy the highest political office in the land? I am inclined to think that there may be some truth in what Rosmah has been saying about his destiny because she has already begun, to preen herself, so the gossip goes, to play the part of Malaysia’s First Lady.
Unfortunately for her, and others who might harbour a similar ambition in the deep recesses of their fantasy, our country is a monarchy, albeit a constitutional one (may it always remain that way) and as such, the First Lady is our queen, not the wife of the prime minister. Her confident prediction of Najib’s political ascendancy and immortality could, in the event, prove to be just a little premature given the murky political waters he is wading through.
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Whenever I think of my friend Karpal Singh, I am reminded of my great headmaster, the late Dr. Frank J. Rawcliffe who taught us the importance of being consistent, even if meant sometimes upsetting some people. You may say what you want about Karpal’s manner, his magisterial pronouncements often delivered with a great roar full of fiery passion, but you cannot accuse him of being inconsistent in the position he has taken over the years on matters involving both personal and public ethical principles. While Karpal clearly recognises that there are, in politics, no permanent friends or foes, he believes devoutly in the importance of “permanent principles.” Unprincipled politics as we have seen in Malaysia can very quickly degenerate into unmitigated disasters. The unsavoury Perak affair is a case in point.
I believe in, and will fight for, my right to say what I like within the law. I naturally accept willingly the accompanying responsibility that such rights impose on me. I should expect to be free from threats of violence for my views, and I was, therefore, shocked to see on TV a disgraceful act of intolerance by a group of UMNO youth, and for a second or two I thought I was watching a familiar scene from a 1935 newsreel showing the storm troopers of the Third Reich pouncing on a hapless Jew in a wheel chair. On this occasion, it was in the hallowed grounds of the national parliament, no less that the brave Malay warriors chose to flex their muscle. The only difference was that UMNO’s storm troopers were not wearing the dreaded brown shirts of their German counterparts of days gone by.
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No one in living memory has ever had to drag so much unnecessary baggage along with him as Datuk Seri Najib Abdul Razak is doing on assuming the highest political office in Malaysia.
My heart naturally goes out to the unfortunate man who has had to fend off, without a break, a relentless barrage of poison-tipped arrows all aimed at his personal and public integrity.
I will not claim to know how he must feel because I would have absolutely no idea unless I were in his well-heeled shoes. And this would be most unlikely even in a million years.
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DAP meminta Menteri di Jabatan Perdana Menteri Datuk Seri Ahmad Zahid Hamidi supaya mengkaji semula keputusanya mendesak semua kerajaan negeri mewartakan larangan penggunaan perkataan “Allah” dalam mana-mana penerbitan bukan Islam.
Adalah lebih baik jika Menteri itu menunggu keputusan Mahkamah Tinggi berhubung perkara itu sebelum membuat sebarang tindakan yang akan hanya mengeruhkan lagi hubungan harmoni rakyat Malaysia.
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As the prime minister begins the process of winding down his stewardship of this country that he inherited from his now much despised predecessor, he would have been less than human if he did not reflect upon the highlights and the low points of his stewardship that in turn cheered and depressed him. He must wonder why, after such a promising start, fate should have intervened to deal him such a cruel hand. The humiliation of being forced to get on the bicycle and ride off alone into the political sunset prematurely has been, he must admit, largely self-inflicted. He must sometimes wonder why he was so incredibly naïve as to swallow the proverbial hook, line and sinker, the assurances and protestations of complete and undying loyalty so glibly and convincingly uttered by his closest associates. I personally would not myself touch them with a long barge pole, but then I suppose I am of a suspicious nature.
When Abdullah Badawi took over the reigns of government, I was among those invited by the media to comment on what his legacy might be. We were swept and overwhelmed by the euphoria of the moment, the dawn of a blessed new era and the end of a morally degrading and debilitating regime. Anyone after Mahathir Mohamad was a welcome change, and the country was happy to give him and the party he led the biggest ever electoral victory in the history of our country. Badawi responded by urging us, his countrymen and women to “work with me and not for me.” This catchphrase symbolising inclusiveness went down well in the beginning, but when people began to see through this as another clever spin-doctoring exercise, it went down like a ton of bricks. Badawi was suave. He could at times be glibly persuasive especially when outlining his agenda against corruption.
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What a waste of public funds! The creation of the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission will go down in history as a feeble and pathetic final clutch at the straws by a sitting duck prime minister best remembered for his inexhaustible supply of good intentions but with nothing to show for them. The MACC was hastily conceived against a murky background of a web of duplicity and deceit. It was a desperate attempt at deluding the people of this country and the world anti-corruption community at large that the Abdullah Badawi administration still had a lot of fire in its belly to make corruption a high risk and low return business. The whole process was nothing more that a charade, a sleight of hand that we had come to expect of this government. In the meantime, corruption continues to be in robust good health.
In 1995 my friends and I started to look at corruption in our country seriously and to view with growing unease its debilitating effects on our society. This led incidentally to the formation of Transparency International Malaysia as it has come to be known. We saw the Anti-Corruption Agency for what it really was in operational terms. It was the weakest link in both the “supply and demand sides” of the corruption equation. We saw the ACA as part of the problem of corruption and not, as it should rightly have been, part of the solution. We thought its claim to “independence” was a joke in poor taste. It was as independent as a beached whale.
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