LIM KIT SIANG : WIRA MALAYSIA!

UMNO HAS FAILED.

The state of affairs now seen on our country leaves us with no other conclusion than that UMNO has failed. It has failed in its effort to justify their demand that we Malaysian should allow them to continue for another fifty years with their tinkering of our democratic values and principals as a trade-off to the ongoing development of our country and the yet to be achieved uplifting of the Malay race to be a developed ethnic community. Two remarkable and truly laudable goals — economic development and the rise and rise of the Malays – but arguments that are fundamentally flawed.

The Government insists that the particularity of Malaysian Politics, its multi-ethnic divides and its religious enclaves make a need for the ISA to be enforced arbitrarily over its people. It continues to dominate over its people, who live defenseless under its shadows. And in all this there is no political accountability in what they do.

I say that the Politics of Barisan Nasional is no longer appropriate for our people, for our country. I say that a multi-ethnic, multi party democracy is what we need. We no longer want a trade-off between democracy and development. Between freedoms to demonstrate responsibly as against what the Government perceives as our inability to do so without causing riot and chaos in the streets.

We no longer tolerate domination of the affairs of our country by UMNO. We reject that premise. We say that the failure of the Malays to advance their cause can be linked directly to UMNO. I say that what obstacle that have been put in place to prevent the coming together of the races and to prevent the ability of the opposition to effectively governed in the state that they were elected in are just the mechanism by which UMNO uses to impose political and economic hegemony over its own people. And their repeated accusation that we as nation are not politically mature enough to weather the complexities of multi ethnic politics is wearing a bit thin. It is time that Barisan stop being patronizing us and begins to understand that the country needs to be return to its people. There is no more need to seek for the Malays historical dispensation on the grounds of a colonial legacy that is flawed. The time for that no longer holds credence with the Malays or the others.

(Click here to read the rest of the article https://blog.limkitsiang.com/2009/09/10/umno-has-failed/#more-5997)

The above article was the very first article I have ever written on politics/current affair ever! That was in September 2009, thirteen years ago. It was posted in Lim Kit Siang for Malaysia.

Let me story you. I had left Malaysia a year before and was living in Adelaide. I did not know how to send an email, write about anything, nor did I know what a blog is. I was learning to navigate YouTube when I came across a video of a session of the Malaysian Parliament.

Lim Kit Siang was speaking. In Malay. I remembered thinking that if he wanted the Malays to listen to what he was saying, he should learn to speak Malay better. That thought stayed in my mind and the next day, I wrote my thoughts on paper and asked my son to email it to Lim Kit Siang. A few days weeks later, he replied that If I have something to say, write it and send it to him. And so I sat down and wrote, for the first time in my life, an article on what I thought of the political situation in Malaysia then, sent it to Kit Siang, and he posted that article "Umno Has Failed" on his Lim Kit Siang for Malaysia.

And so for the next year and a bit more, whenever I had something to say, I wrote it down, sent it to Kit Siang, and he posted it in Lim Kit Siang for Malaysia. I think I wrote about 50 articles and he never suggested to me as to what I should write or what I can write. That is how I started writing. About a year later I started my blog “Steadyaku47”.

So in short, this 75-year-old Malay, who has by now, posted over twenty thousand articles, owes his start in writing and blogging to Mr. Lim Kit Siang.

Thank you, Mr Lim Kit Siang. Thank you not only giving this Malay the head start to being a blogger but more valuable, for Malaysians and for Malaysia, thank you for a lifetime of wisdom, selfless contributions and loyalty to a nation we all call ours, but a nation that have instead treated us all, as pariahs. All respect and awe to a lifetime of being a true Malaysian in every sense of the word. Tabek Tuan!