Lets make Malaysia great again

I am writing this Open Letter to all candidates to the 15th General Election as it is likely to be the most important general election in Malaysian history.

Tomorrow is Nomination Day for the 15GE.

I ask all candidates to unite on one message: Lets make Malaysia great again.

In the past 65 years of nationhood, we have strayed from the original nation-building principles of our founding fathers as embedded in the Malaysian Constitution and the Rukun Negara.

We had aspired, in the words of Bapa Malaysia, Tunku Abdul Rahman, to be a “beacon of light to a difficult and distracted world” but in the last six decades, we contributed to the darkness in the world.

UMNO veteran and political secretary to the first Penang Chief Minister, Tan Sri Yusoff Latiff is fond of reminiscing that when the late Tunku Abdul Rahman took over the UMNO leadership from Onn Jaafar in 1951, the party had no money, and Tunku sold his house in Penang to fund the running of UMNO.

But today, we do not have an UMNO President who had to sell his house to fund the running of UMNO. Instead, we have the international spectacle of nearly 300 boxes of designer handbags and dozens of bags filled with cash and jewellery among the items taken away by police in raids at properties linked to a former UMNO President who was also Prime Minister – which contained RM114 million in cash in 26 currencies and Birkin handbags each worth up to hundreds of thousands of dollars!

The first four UMNO Presidents, Onn Jaafar, Tunku Abdul Rahman, Razak Hussein and Hussein Onn would never have made the brutally frank speech which the current UMNO President, Ahmad Zahid Hamidi, made at the MIC Assembly on the day Parliament was dissolved – that the 15GE was to save UMNO and Barisan Nasional “Court Clusters” from being charged in court for corruption and being sent to jail.

None of the first four UMNO Presidents would countenance Malaysia becoming a kleptocracy with its infamy world-wide, let alone “kleptocracy at its worst”!

Razak Hussein “swimming pool” is now famous because of the recounting of his youngest son, Nazir, who recalled his father, with eyebrows raised, asking: “How would it look if the Prime Minister spent public money on building a swimming pool for his family?”

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 Bank Rakyat scandal would be a “bitter lesson to other government institutions and agencies including companies and subsidiaries set up by the Government”.

But from a RM100 million Bank Rakyat scandal in 1979, we have ballooned to a RM50 billion 1MDB scandal three decades later as well as many other mega scandals, including the latest, the RM9 billion littoral combatant ships (LCS) scandal.

The original founding fathers like Tan Cheng Lock, Tan Siew Sin and V.T. Sambanthan would never countenanced Malaysia becoming a “kleptocracy”, let alone “kleptocracy at its worst” and included in the ranks of world kleptocrats like Marcos of Philippines and Suharto of Indonesia. It is unimaginable that they would not have spoken to denounce the 1MDB scandal.

Wikipedia defines “kleptocracy” as a a government whose corrupt leaders use political power to expropriate the wealth of the people and land they govern, typically by embezzling or misappropriating government funds at the expense of the wider population.

It is no different from “Thievocracy” which literally means the rule by thievery and is a term used synonymously to kleptocracy.

In a kleptocracy, corrupt politicians enrich themselves secretly outside the rule of law, through kickbacks, bribes, and special favors, or they simply direct state funds to themselves and their associates.

In the 14th General Election, kleptocracy referred to one person and to the 1MDB scandal.

In the 15th General Election, kleptocracy refers to more than one person and more than the 1MDB mega financial scandal.

Malaysia has lost its way.

We must reset and find our way back to the original nation-building principles of our founding fathers or we will stray further away until we end up as a failed and rogue state like Sri Lanka or Zimbabwe during Malaysia’s Centennial in another four decades.

Let us return to the original nation-building principles of our founding fathers– constitutional monarchy, parliamentary democracy, separation of powers, rule of law, an independent judiciary, good governance, public integrity with minimum corruption, meritocracy, respect for human rights and national unity and harmony from our multi-racial, multi-lingual, multi-religious and multi-cultural diversity.

We have lost out economically to one country after another – Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong and Vietnam. Unless we buck up, we will lose out to more countries.

We must recognise that Malaysia is in deep trouble, reflected from the value of our Malaysian ringgit, when we were one Malaysian Ringgit to one Singapore dollar in 1965 but which has devalued to one Singapore Dollar to 3.345 Malaysian Ringgit.

When Transparency International (TI) started its annual Corruption Perception Index (CPI) in 1995, we were way ahead of China, India and Indonesia.

Since then, China, India and Indonesia have closed the gap of a clean and honest government, and it is likely that China will overtake Malaysia in the TI CPI in this decade, and India and Indonesia will overtake Malaysia in the next decade.

Malaysia is still save-able and worth saving.

Let all candidates pledge that they will do their utmost to prevent Malaysia from becoming a Sri Lanka or Zimbabwe by Malaysia’s Centennial to fulfil Malaysia’s potential to be a great world-class plural nation and fully restore Sabah and Sarawak’s status based on Malaysia Agreement 1963.

Finally, I ask Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad and Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah to decline nomination as candidate in the 15th General Election.

Let the fulfilment of the Malaysian Dream to be a great world-class plural nation be on the shoulders of younger Malaysians.

Furthermore, let Bagan Datuk be a straight fight between kleptocracy versus rakyat of Malaysia.