It is very clear that the MCA leadership has not learnt the lesson of its 2013 General Election electoral debacle which reduced the MCA from the second biggest Barisan Nasional party to a puny “7/11 party” – MCA Ministers saying one thing outside but doing the very opposite inside the Cabinet.
Just go back to the 1999 General Election – when MCA won 29 Parliamentary seats which is more than the total number of 28 Barisan Nasional parliamentary seats from Sarawak and the 2013 General Election where MCA won a miserable seven parliamentary seats, edged out as the second largest BN party with MPs by PBB which had 14 MPs and only one seat more than PRS which won six Parliamentary seats!
In 1999 GE, MCA had more MPs than all Sarawak BN parties combined, but in the 2013 GE, Sarawak BN MPs is more than three-and-a-half times that of MCA, with Sarawak BN MPs number 25 compared to MCA’s 7.
MCA President Datuk Seri Liow Tiong Lai recently revealed that MCA had over a million members, when maverick columnist Ridhuan Tee Abdullah announced that he was quitting as a MCA life member.
This would mean that only some 30 per cent MCA members had voted for MCA candidates in the 2013 GE. The total number of votes polled by MCA parliamentary candidates in the 2013 GE came to 867,851. Assuming that some two-thirds of these votes are UMNO votes, this would mean that MCA had only 280,000 to 300,000 MCA members voting for MCA candidates – which is 30 per cent or even less of the total MCA membership.
The reason for this shocking state of affairs is very simple – MCA had not only lost the trust and confidence of Malaysians as a whole, including the Chinese community, but even the overwhelming majority of the MCA card-carrying members.
This is because of MCA Ministers saying one thing outside but doing the very opposite in the Cabinet – and the MCA Ministers’ stand on Hadi’s hudud bill provides the latest example.
MCA’s three Ministers, led by Liow Tiong Lai, have maintained that Hadi’s hudud bill is unconstitutional but how can they be part of the Cabinet whose Minister has expressed support for this bill, even to the extent of moving a Ministerial motion to fast-track Hadi’s bill on the last day of Parliament on May 26?
Yesterday, I gave the MCA President Datuk Seri Liow Tiong Lai and the Gerakan President Datuk Seri Mah Siew Keong a 48-hour ultimatum to requisition for an emergency Barisan Nasional Supreme Council meeting to resolve the week-long spat caused by the Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department, Datuk Azalina Said Othman for her Ministerial motion in Parliament last Thursday to fast-track Hadi’s Hudud Bill or Malaysians have to conclude that both the MCA and Gerakan Presidents were privy to the Najib-Hadi plot.
I do not expect Liow or Mah to either have the courage of their conviction or the principled stand to requisition for an emergency meeting of the BN Supreme Council meeting to resolve the BN spat over Azalina’s Ministerial motion, even when Azalina had acted in violation of the consensus reached by all Barisan Nasional leaders on the same issue in March 2015 as well as the reaffirmation by Cabinet at its meeting on 20th May 2015 of a fundamental Barisan Nasional stand.
In fact, can the MCA and Gerakan Ministers explain what they had done at the Cabinet meeting two days ago to repudiate Azalina’s Ministerial motion, especially in supporting Hadi’s unconstitutional hudud bill.
Didn’t they just keep quiet to condone Azalina’s Ministerial motion?
I do not believe that the MCA leadership has learnt the lesson of the 2013 General Elections debacle which had reduced MCA from the second largest BN party into a puny “7/11 party”.