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In His Majesty we trust

by Tunku Aziz
The Malaysian Insider – Opinion | 20 March 2009

Zaid Ibrahim is one person I greatly admire because he, no matter what the subject is under discussion, is ready to take it on with courage and candour.

Zaid is his own man, beholden to no one as far as I know, and is not out there in the public domain to please his political masters because clearly he has none.

In my conversations with him over the last few months on a range of political issues, I have noticed, much to my surprise and delight, that he is apparently incapable of harbouring any malice, not even towards people who have acted malevolently against him.
Continue reading “In His Majesty we trust”

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Consistency Of Purpose, Duty And Responsibility

by Tunku Abdul Aziz
mysinchew.com

Whenever I think of my friend Karpal Singh, I am reminded of my great headmaster, the late Dr. Frank J. Rawcliffe who taught us the importance of being consistent, even if meant sometimes upsetting some people.

You may say what you want about Karpal’s manner, his magisterial pronouncements often delivered with a great roar full of fiery passion, but you cannot accuse him of being inconsistent in the position he has taken over the years on matters involving both personal and public ethical principles.

While Karpal clearly recognises that there are, in politics, no permanent friends or foes, he believes devoutly in the importance of “permanent principles.”

Unprincipled politics as we have seen in Malaysia can very quickly degenerate into unmitigated disasters. The unsavoury Perak affair is a case in point.

I believe in, and will fight for, my right to say what I like within the law. I naturally accept willingly the accompanying responsibility that such rights impose on me.

I should expect to be free from threats of violence for my views, and I was, therefore, shocked to see on TV a disgraceful act of intolerance by a group of UMNO youth, and for a second or two I thought I was watching a familiar scene from a 1935 newsreel showing the storm troopers of the Third Reich pouncing on a hapless Jew in a wheel chair.

On this occasion, it was in the hallowed grounds of the national parliament, no less that the brave Malay warriors chose to flex their muscle. The only difference was that UMNO’s storm troopers were not wearing the dreaded brown shirts of their German counterparts of days gone by. Continue reading “Consistency Of Purpose, Duty And Responsibility”

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Baggage too heavy for our new PM

By Tunku Aziz
Opinion | The Malaysian Insider | 13 March 2009

No one in living memory has ever had to drag so much unnecessary baggage along with him as Datuk Seri Najib Abdul Razak is doing on assuming the highest political office in Malaysia.

My heart naturally goes out to the unfortunate man who has had to fend off, without a break, a relentless barrage of poison-tipped arrows all aimed at his personal and public integrity.

I will not claim to know how he must feel because I would have absolutely no idea unless I were in his well-heeled shoes. And this would be most unlikely even in a million years.

Under different and happier circumstances, he should be celebrating his moment of destiny, the attainment, albeit Umno-style, of the greatest political prize of all.
Continue reading “Baggage too heavy for our new PM”

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Pak Lah’s Legacy

By Tunku Aziz
Mysinchew.com

As the prime minister begins the process of winding down his stewardship of this country that he inherited from his now much despised predecessor, he would have been less than human if he did not reflect upon the highlights and the low points of his stewardship that in turn cheered and depressed him.

He must wonder why, after such a promising start, fate should have intervened to deal him such a cruel hand. The humiliation of being forced to get on the bicycle and ride off alone into the political sunset prematurely has been, he must admit, largely self-inflicted.

He must sometimes wonder why he was so incredibly naïve as to swallow the proverbial hook, line and sinker, the assurances and protestations of complete and undying loyalty so glibly and convincingly uttered by his closest associates.

I personally would not myself touch them with a long barge pole, but then I suppose I am of a suspicious nature.

When Abdullah Badawi took over the reigns of government, I was among those invited by the media to comment on what his legacy might be. We were swept and overwhelmed by the euphoria of the moment, the dawn of a blessed new era and the end of a morally degrading and debilitating regime. Continue reading “Pak Lah’s Legacy”

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MACC: Old wine in a new bottle

by Tunku Abdul Aziz
Sin Chew

What a waste of public funds! The creation of the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission will go down in history as a feeble and pathetic final clutch at the straws by a sitting duck prime minister best remembered for his inexhaustible supply of good intentions but with nothing to show for them. The MACC was hastily conceived against a murky background of a web of duplicity and deceit. It was a desperate attempt at deluding the people of this country and the world anti-corruption community at large that the Abdullah Badawi administration still had a lot of fire in its belly to make corruption a high risk and low return business. The whole process was nothing more that a charade, a sleight of hand that we had come to expect of this government. In the meantime, corruption continues to be in robust good health.

In 1995 my friends and I started to look at corruption in our country seriously and to view with growing unease its debilitating effects on our society. This led incidentally to the formation of Transparency International Malaysia as it has come to be known. We saw the Anti-Corruption Agency for what it really was in operational terms. It was the weakest link in both the “supply and demand sides” of the corruption equation. We saw the ACA as part of the problem of corruption and not, as it should rightly have been, part of the solution. We thought its claim to “independence” was a joke in poor taste. It was as independent as a beached whale.

We demanded from day one that the ACA be converted into an independent commission along the lines of the highly professional Independent Commission Against Corruption with a strong and influential oversight civilian committee to keep an eye on the staff who could otherwise be tempted to abuse their wide powers. Continue reading “MACC: Old wine in a new bottle”

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Man Does Not Live By Bread Alone

By Tunku Abdul Aziz
MySinchew

Today, I begin a new life as a columnist for Sin Chew, an experience that I know I will enjoy enormously.

Two days ago, I had lunch with a parliamentarian and two senior bureaucrats from Germany on their first official visit to Kuala Lumpur. They came, they saw and were impressed with our capital city and the development they had seen so far as they travelled around KL and its environs. They had obviously been well-briefed by their own government agencies about the social and political climate in our country and apparently were extremely well informed on Malaysian affairs. The Germans, as we all know, are meticulous in everything they do, and so I was not at all surprised when one of them who headed his organization’s foreign department asked this penetrating question.

“Why is there all this flurry of activity to bring about a regime change when the government has brought so much prosperity to the country?” I must admit that for a while I was stumped for words. Why indeed! When at last I recovered my composure, I explained between mouthfuls of tasty offerings that what was apparent was not always real. In our wide-ranging conversation I reflected aloud our national concerns in the following terms.

Underneath all the glint, gleam and glitter of aluminium, stainless steel and plate glass lies a sad tale of greed and corruption, involving the political and bureaucratic elites who govern and administer this land. There will be official denials galore. Some years ago, Transparency International estimated, somewhat conservatively many thought, that Malaysian public infrastructure projects cost 30% more than they should. As far as political corruption is concerned, a major component of the ruling coalition has admitted that problem exists among its membership and the party is wrestling with it as best it can. Continue reading “Man Does Not Live By Bread Alone”