by Bahaman Abdullah
The Malaysian Insider
Jul 05, 2011

JULY 5 — Since Ibrahim Ali is so fond of giving everyone ultimatums (the latest being to MCA, Gerakan and Ambiga Sreenivasan), I suggest we give Umno and Najib Razak a list of 10 conditions to be met if he wants the support of urban Malaysia.

1) Distance yourself publicly from Ibrahim Ali and Perkasa. Failure to do so will be taken as a sign that all the garbage from Ibrahim is endorsed by the Umno president and his kuncu-kuncu.

2) Stop using divide and rule tactics to keep Malaysians apart. The only reason why BN worried about Bersih is that this election reform movement appears to have brought Malaysians of different races and religious groups together.

3) Tackle corruption and start by investigating cabinet ministers, senior politicians for living way, way beyond their means.

4)Revamp the education system and place less emphasis on rote learning and churning thousands of university graduates who are unemployable.

5) Introduce meritocracy in the public sector and slash the bloated bureaucracy.

6) Promote the likes of Hishammuddin Hussein at your peril. The party which has led Malaysia since independence has swung to the right and this is exemplified by people like Hishammuddin and Rais Yatim.

7) Throw out the alphabet soup of committees and government programmes like ETP or GTP and make structural changes so that Malaysia can become a high income economy, and not some wish list of projects for politically-connected businessmen. By the way, you may want to reconsider if Idris Jala is the right man to steer the Malaysian reform programme. I mean he supposedly saved Malaysia Airlines and we know where the national airline is now: in the toilet.

8) This condition is directed at Najib. Stop all this public relations crap and slogans and focus on real change. Your performance in handling Bersih was at best a C- and that was because you seem unsure if you are a reformer or a politician cut from the same cloth as Mahathir Mohamad.

9) Stop allowing your cronies from raping and looting Malaysia. Everyone knows that 1MDB is nothing but a smokescreen for election funding and shady deals. We have already had to bail out the scandalous PKFZ. According to Anwar Ibrahim, 1MDB could become an even bigger mess.

10) Pull off more stunts like the Datuk T porn video trick at your peril. Malaysians expect fair play and justice, not a loaded judiciary or injustice perpretrated by a government just because it controls the institutions.

So how about it, Najib and Umno? Can you satisfy these conditions.

P/s: I am already assuming that you will allow Utusan Malaysia and other ragsheets to become real newspapers.