Khairy Jamaluddin is at least getting more realistic from his earlier ambition to become Malaysian Prime Minister before he was 40 years old.
At the present rate, if Khairy becomes Prime Minister he will be in the fifties.
In Sungei Buloh today, Khairy said he wanted to “cleanse” UMNO to bring it back its former glory.
Khairy is the first UMNO candidate to say that UMNO must change and return to the original nation-building principles of the first four UMNO Presidents, Onn Jaafar, Tunku Abdul Rahman, Razak Hussein and Hussein Onn.
But UMNO cannot return to the original nation-building principles, which among other things accepted the fact that Malaysia is a multi-racial, multi-lingual, multi-religious and multi-cultural nation, with only one reformer.
There must be one group of committed UMNO reformers and up to now, nobody can see such a group.
Khairy said he wanted to bring change to UMNO and want Umno to be seen again as a noble vessel for the Malay community.
He said: “Nowadays, many people meet and tell me it’s not that they don’t like Umno but they don’t like some (individuals) in Umno.”
But is there a group of leaders in UMNO who want UMNO not to be identified with corruption and kleptocracy?
There is no doubt that UMNO has today changed its character from that of the first four UMNO Presidents, Onn Jaafar, Tunku Abdul Rahman, Razak Hussein and Hussein Onn.
None of them will countenance Malaysia becoming a kleptocracy with it infamy world-wide, let alone “kleptocracy at its worst”.
In 1979, at the UMNO General Assembly, the then Prime Minister, Hussein Onn warned that Malaysia will be destroyed if its leaders are “dishonest, untrustworthy and corrupt” and expressed the hope that the Bank Rakyat scandal would be a “bitter lesson to other government institutions and agencies including companies and subsidiaries set up by the Government”.
But Hussein Onn’s warning were not heeded, and we have a RM50 billion 1MDB scandal and an UMNO leader who was the sixth Prime Minister who was sent to jail to serve his 12-year jail sentence and RM210 million fine.
From a RM100 million Bank Rakyat scandal in 1979, we have graduated to a RM50 billion 1MDB scandal three decades later.
Will it increase 10 times to a RM500 billion scandal if UMNO does not completely divorce itself from corruption and kleptocracy and is returned to power in the 15GE?
(Media Statement by DAP veteran Lim Kit Siang in Bentong on Saturday, November 12, 2022)