Has Tok Mat bitten off more than he could chew?
Has UMNO Deputy President Mohamad Hasan bitten off more than he could chew in his interview with Asia Times, which is not helped by the explanation of the newest UMNO Supreme Council member, Isham Jalil, that Tok Mat was merely preparing himself for the worst-case scenario in Najib Razak’s corruption trlal.
Tok Mat is correct about the right of everyone to a fair trial but this cannot hide the fact that his protest that he had been misquoted as saying that Najib should go to jail for his role in the 1MDB scandal is not confirmed by anyone listening to the full tape recording.
Even more important, the latest “dance” of an UMNO top leader on the 1MDB scandal had only highlighted the utter failure of the UMNO leadership and UMNO to condemn the monstrous mega multi-billion 1MDB scandal which had earned for Malaysia the infamy of being regarded by the world as “kleptocracy at its worst”.
The latest interview of the Prime Minister, Ismail Sabri with Asia Nikkei carried the headline “Malaysian PM hope to brush off 1MDB scandal in next election”.
This fortified the argument that the top UMNO leaders and UMNO are not prepared to return to the original nation-building principles and policies of the founding-fathers of nation who stipulated in the Malaysian Constitution and Rukun Negara the important principles of good governance and public integrity, where the battle against corruption is taken seriously.
The third Prime Minister of Malaysia, Tun Hussein Onn, would not “brush off” the 1MDB scandal but condemn it in the strongest terms to ensure that country is not afflicted in the future by 2MDB, 3MBD and 4MDB mega financial scandals.
In 1979, at the UMNO General Assembly, the then Prime Minister , Hussein Onn warned that Malaysia will be destroyed if its leaders were “dishonest, untrustworthy and corrupt” and expressed the hope that the RM100 million Bank Rakyat scandal would be a “bitter lesson to other government institutions and agencies including companies and subsidiaries set up by the Government”.
However, Hussein Onn’s warning 43 years ago that Malaysia will be ”destroyed if the leaders are dishonest, untrustworthy and corrupt” fell on deaf ears and will be proven true before Malaysia’s Centennial if there is no reset of Malaysia nation-building policies and principles to get out of the present trajectory of a kleptocracy in the next three to four decades.
It is tragic that there seems be no Hussein Onn in the top UMNO leadership today.
Who will step forward in UMNO to be the Hussein Onn of today before UMNO and Malaysia are destroyed?