On Friday, I attended a youth camp at Janda Baik and the topic I was asked to talk about was: “Is the idea of a Malaysian an empty dream?”

This was particularly pertinent, as only a week earlier, Pakatan Harapan was given a drubbing in the Tanjong Piai parliamentary by-election, where Pakatan Harapan not only lost the seat which it had clinched with a slim majority of 524 votes 18 months earlier in the 14th General Election, but lost it with a landslide majority of 15,086 votes.

If the Tanjong Piai by-election is a harbinger of the 15th General Election in 2023, then the Pakatan Harapan government would be a one-term government and would be voted out of Putrajaya in the next general election.

But do Malaysians want a return of the UMNO-BN government, which would come back under the guise of Muafakat Nasional with PAS, and the quandary of the country which resulted in the Pakatan Harapan loss in the Tanjong Piai by-election becoming the order of the day – the politics of race and religion taking to their extremity with both the Malays and non-Malays in fear that their rights, position and future are under unprecedented threat by other communities making the topic of the youth camp, “Is the idea of a Malaysian an empty dream?” a most prescient and relevant one!

The past week has revealed more about the mendacity and immorality of the previous kleptocratic regime, how the 1MDB audit report prepared for the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee was tampered by the former Prime Minister with the deletion of important information about the 1MDB scandal, like the presence of Jho Low at a meeting of the 1MDB Board of Directors and the financial status of 1MDB or the revelation in the trial of the former Deputy Prime Minister for bribery, criminal breach of trust and money-laundering that not one cent of the RM31 million in a foundation to help the poor was used to help the poor.

Is this global kleptocracy the type of governance Malaysians want to revert to or would Malaysia become ungovernable and the country’s fate is to be a failed, rogue and kleptocratic state? Read the rest of this entry »