Datuk Seri Najib Razak is nearing his first two-and-a-half months as the new Prime Minister in Malaysia, but he does not seem to be able to do anything right, as he is still dogged by a deepening crisis of credibility, integrity and legitimacy of his premiership.
This is why Najib should be brave enough to cut the Gordian Knot of this crisis of confidence and ask for a vote of confidence as the first item of parliamentary agenda when Parliament reconvenes on Monday. Whether on the political, economic, educational or nation-building front, Najib has still to deliver his first accomplishment.
Politically, Najib inflicted on himself a deep and grievous wound in orchestrating the unethical, undemocratic, illegal and unconstitutional power grab in Perak.
Economically, Najib’s two RM67 billion economic stimulus packages are both failures as evident by the downward revision of 3.5% GDP growth in 2009 in the first RM7 billion package last November to the current estimate that Malaysian economy will shrink by 4-5 per cent.
In a period of nine months, the Malaysian economy has plunged from a government forecast of 2009 GDP growth of 5.4% (2009 Budget presented in Parliament on 29th August 2008) to 3.5% (Najib’s first RM7 billion economic stimulus package in Parliament on 4th November 2008), then down to the range of minus 1.0 per cent to 1.0 per cent (Najib’s second RM60 billion economic stimulus package in Parliament on March 10, 2009) to a contraction by four or five per cent for the whole of this year (announced by Najib on 28th May 2009).
On the law-and-order front, Malaysians, visitors and investors have never felt so unsafe in the streets, public places or even the privacy of their homes because of galloping crime – yet we have a Inspector-General of Police who is so cut off from the people’s basic needs that he could misallocate scarce police resources to harass peaceful demonstrators lighting candles, wearing black or even singing birthday song instead of going after the real criminals!
In education and development of human resources to build a knowledge-based economy, meritocracy is still a bad word – with the annual “begging” session when SPM students with 11As, 12As, 13As, 14As are denied Public Service Department scholarships as compared with applicants with 6As.
If reminders are needed that far from transforming into a developed nation, Malaysia risks becoming a failed state, there are examples galore from the recent collapse of the roof of the RM300 million 50,000-capacity Sultan Mizan Zainal Abidin Stadium in Gong Badak within a year of completion to the RM12.5 billion Port Klang Free Zone (PKFZ) scandal!
Najib has also failed to send out the right signals that his motto of “1Malaysia. People First. Performance Now” is not just an empty slogan but driving and living principles of his administration.
What 1Malaysia is Najib talking about when he is the architect as to why there is no 1Perak, when he cannot debunk the equation of his 1Malaysia with 1Black Malaysia, and when there is no 1Barisan Nasional, with 78.1 per cent or 2,409 out of 3,084 persons polled in the blog of the MCA President, Datuk Seri Ong Tee Keat, want MCA to get out of the Barisan Nasional?
(Speech at the Serdang DAP Branch’s 42nd anniversary dinner in Seri Kembangan, Selangor on Saturday,13th June 2009)