Anwar’s admission that Malaysia is losing out to Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam is a good sign that Malaysia is coming out of the denial syndrome that the country has straggled behind other countries after six decades of nation-building and that there must a reset and return to the original nation-building principles of the nation’s founding fathers for Malaysia to be a first-rate world-class nation

The 10th Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim’s admission that Malaysia is losing out to Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam is a good sign that Malaysia is coming out of the denial syndrome that the country has straggled behind other countries after six decades of nation-building and that there must a reset and return to the original nation-building principles of the nation’s founding fathers for Malaysia to be a first-rate world-class nation.

I have sounded like a broken record in my reiteration that after six decades of nation-building, Malaysia has fallen from the status of a first-rate world-class nation to become a second-rate mediocre country, and unless the country reset and return to the original nation-building principles entrenched in the Constitution and the Rukun Negara by the nation’s founding fathers, the present trajectory will end up with Malaysia as a divided, failed, and kleptocratic state in the next few decades.

I do not want Malaysia to end up as a divided, failed, and kleptocratic state in the next few decades, just as I do not want the Anwar unity government to be toppled by another infamous Sheraton Move political conspiracy with my repeated warnings that there are conspirators afoot who wanted to prematurely end the life of the Anwar unity government before it completes its term of five years.

Malaysia cannot reset and return to the original nation-building principles of the nation’s founding fathers unless we admit that have strayed in our nation-building and lost out to one country after another, and the latest example is the Transparency Interntional (TI) Corruption Perception Index (CPI) 2022.

The two “backdoor” governments of Muhyiddin Yassin and Ismail Sabri could not continue with the anti-corruption efforts of the Pakatan Harapan government to achieve better results than the 1995 TI CPI but were responsible for another plunge in TI CPI to the lowest score in a decade and 62nd ranking out of 180 countries.

We have lost out not only to the Top 10 countries led by Denmark and which includes Singapore, we have also lost out to five countries in the first annual TI CPI 1995 list (Taiwan, South Korea, Spain, Italy, and Greece). Furthermore, we have also lost out to countries like Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Croatia, Mauritius, and Vanuatu, and drew with Jordan.

Unless we buck up, we will be overtaken by Armenia, China, Cuba, Bahrain, Jamaica, Oman, Benin, Bulgaria, Ghana, Senegal, South Africa, Burkina Faso, Hungary, Kuwait, Timor-Leste, Vietnam, Kosovo, Guyana, India, Maldives, Suriname, and Tunisia by the end of the decade.

Even Indonesia has progressively improved from 1995 to 34 out of 100 marks in 2022, while Malaysia has progressively regressed from 1995 to 47 points out of 100 marks in 2022.

In the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) countries, we have lost out to United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, and we stand to lose out to more OIC countries if we continue in the trajectory of decline in the TI CPI series.

This is why I have suggested that the seven-week Parliamentary meeting starting on Monday should be the most memorable Parliamentary meeting in Malaysian history in initiating institutional reforms for Malaysia to achieve the twin goals of uniting the plural society in Malaysia and to restore Malaysia as a first-rate world-class nation.

The forthcoming Parliament should adopt a Charter of Public Integrity to propel Malaysia to be one of the top countries in the world in public integrity and on the anti-corruption front where the happiness of Malaysians should be the topmost government priority and not that of cronies and the political class as reflected in the most dismal report of TI CPI 2022.