Tomorrow, the Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s seven-month-old Cabinet will gather for a third round to finalise programmes under the Key Performance Index (KPI) and National Key Results Areas (NKRAs) which are to be made public on Thursday and Friday.

In the past two months, seven laboratories had been set up to test out ideas and strategies in the six priority areas outlined in the NKRA – reducing crime, fighting corruption, widening access to affordable and quality education, raising the living standard of the poor, improving infrastructure in the rural areas and public transportation with the seventh the 1Malaysia lab focussed on ways to foster unity among the various races.

It is most tragic and the irony of ironies that in the seven months that Najib was proclaiming the 1Malaysia slogan and concept, national unity was the constant target of a most systematic and unscrupulous attacks, with one extremist, provocative and seditious statement and action followed by another, seriously aggravating racial and religious polarisation in plural Malaysia.

Such examples are aplenty, from the religiously insensitive cow-head protest in Shah Alam to the outpouring of statements of falsehood, hate and incitement given prominence in certain mainstream media.

The divisive, racist and seditious Biro Tata Negara (BTN) indoctrination course is among the latest controversies being used to whip up racial ill-will and animosity.

Former Prime Minister Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi has come out in defence of his predecessor Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, declaring that the BTN “is certainly not racist”.

I can accept that the BTN course was not “racist” in conception, but there can be no denial that over the years it had become a divisive, racist and seditious indoctrination programme serving as an Umno “civics course” instead of being a national civics course to promote Malaysian consciousness and foster national unity. Such testimony is overwhelming and they could be easily collated with the establishment of a Royal Commission of Inquiry.

What confidence can Najib inspire among Malaysians regardless of race and religion in his “inclusive” 1Malaysia slogan and concept when a whole generation of civil servants are products of such divisive, racist and seditious BTN indoctrination and the Cabinet is not even prepared to admit and apologise for the BTN’s history of divisive, racist and seditious indoctrination programmes?

It is no exaggeration to say that the most important of Najib’s seven KPIs, 1Malaysia, has been a dismal failure in the larger laboratory of Malaysia in the past seven months.

How can Najib convince Malaysians that his KPI programme is not just hot air and propaganda, “full of sound and fury signifying nothing”?