Ten years go in 2018, Parliament was dissolved a week before my birthday and I made a birthday wish that DAP would capture the Penang State Government in the 12th General Election on March 8, 2008.

I never made public my 2008 birthday wish before polling day but it was a birthday wish fulfilled as on March 8, 2008, DAP shocked the nation and replaced Gerakan in Penang and formed the Penang State Government.

Ten years later today, the holding of the 14th General Election is again the obsession of the day, with general elections expected to be held in less than 80 days before mid-May.

I made a birthday wish during my birthday five days ago, for Malaysia to become a normal democracy like Japan, South Korea, India and Indonesia where voters can democratically and peacefully change the government-of-the-day through the ballot box by electing Pakatan Harapan to replace UMNO/BN as the Federal Government in 14GE.

If Pakatan Harapan, a coalition of DAP, PKR, AMANAH and PPBM, captures Federal power in Putrajaya, Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad will return to Putrajaya as the seventh Prime Minister of Malaysia and Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim will follow suit as the eighth Prime Minister of Malaysia.

In the first 100 days of the new Federal government of Malaysia, Pakatan Harapan will begin a Save Malaysia campaign to halt the country’s present trajectory towards a failed, rogue and kleptocratic state to achieve the Malaysian Dream first conceived when Merdeka was attained in 1957 and Malaysia formed in 1963 where the people of a nation comprising diverse races, religions, languages and cultures could pool their talents and resources to transform Malaysia into a show-case to the world as to how a plural nation could leverage on its diversity to be its unique strength and succeed as a united, harmonious, just, progressive and prosperous society.

More than anyone of the previous thirteen general elections from 1959 to 2013, the 14th General Election in April or May 2018 will be about the future of the country for the next fifty and even 100 years.

Malaysians will be asked to cast their vote on polling day in the 14GE not so much for themselves, but for the future of their children and children’s children and the fate of the nation, whether we are going to be a sick nation constantly hounded and haunted by charlatans and extremists or a vibrant and vigorous nation continuously setting new international standards for the rest of the world.

For the first fifty years of the nation’s life, Malaysia had been punching beyond its weight, respected by friend and foe in the international arena.

In the last five years, however, Malaysians are embarrassed internationally because Malaysia is regarded world-wide as a global kleptocracy.

We can try to control the minds of the people inside the country, dismissing the international multi-billion dollar 1MDB kleptocratic money-laundering scandal as non-existent, even “fake news”; pretend that the US Department of Justice (DoJ) largest kleptocratic litigation on the 1MDB scandal does not exsit; with Parliament and the Judiciary in an unholy alliance with the Executive to clamp down on all discussion or disclosures on the 1MDB scandal; but we just cannot control the minds of the international community and ban frequent world-wide developments of the 1MDB scandal in the information age where information travels at the speed of light.

In fact, I do not believe that the Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak could even succeed in sweeping the 1MDB scandal under the carpet inside Malaysia.

Najib can control and direct the official television channels and the mainstream mass media, printed and electronic, to banish all reporting about the 1MDB scandal, but all these efforts will prove in vain in the information age, and the 14GE should be a time of reckoning of such pretence and humbug, especially over the 1MDB scandal and Malaysia’s international 3Is – infamy, ignominy and iniquity as a global kleptocracy.

(Speech at the AMANAH pre-14GE kopitiam ceramah in Senggerang, Batu Pahat on Sunday, February 25, 2018 at 9 a.m.)