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By P Gunasegaram
When lawyer-activist Haris Ibrahim first coined the phrase “Anything But Umno” in 2011, he had to wait seven years until 2018 before the public rejected Umno/BN to vote Pakatan Harapan into government. (Both the English and Malay acronym are the same ABU- Asalkan Bukan Umno in Malay)
In Oct 2022, less than a year before his death due to cancer and after the elected Harapan government was toppled by the traitorous Sheraton move in early 2020, he expanded it to include those PKR defectors who contributed to the fall - Azmin Ali, Zuraida Kamaruddin and Saifuddin Abdullah - the untrustworthy trinity.
Another metamorphosis was made in November the same year when Haris included PAS under the category. He explained: “It looks like Harapan has to turn to Umno/BN to avoid a PAS-dominated government, which is what would happen if PN (Perikatan Nasional, the coalition whose main partners are PAS and Bersatu) was allowed to take the lead in forming the new administration.
“I have touched on two elements regarding the divisive politics of the country. One is ethnicity. The other is religion and PAS represents the most dangerous of the latter,” he said.
To these, I would like to humbly add ex-Umno too. It looks like once one is tainted with the Umno blood and DNA, it's for forever. No matter what they say they will do or the unfair suffering they have undergone before, once they come into power, they forget all that.
We have never had a prime minister who was not from Umno or previously did not hold a very high position in Umno. Current prime minister Anwar Ibrahim himself was a deputy president of Umno and finance minister in 1998 when he was sacked by then PM Mahathir Mohamad and subsequently incarcerated.
Therein lies the problem - all of them think that once they become PM, they can do what they pretty much want. Promises were made merely to get to that place.
Bear with me as I trace the PMs. The first prime minister Tunku Abdul Rahman was great, right? Not all the time. Remember he fought off Umno’s first president Onn Jaffar in the forties who advocated multiracial parties to ensure racial equality and peace. What would Malaysia be if that had happened?
We will never know, will we? But one thing is clear: the racial and religious politics that this country was built on and suffers from may have been far reduced if Onn had succeeded.
The second PM Abdul Razak Hussein, together with other so-called young Turks from Umno, including one Dr Mahathir Mohamad, Musa Hitam, Selangor chief minister then Harun Idris and others helped engineer a coup to oust Tunku, after the ruling party performed badly in the 1969 elections.
The racial riots of May 13 that year actually started from a demonstration at the house of Harun Idris in Kampung Baru, Kuala Lumpur, sparking off the first major racial riots in Malaysia since independence in 1957.
Razak put in the controversial New Economic Policy (NEP), hastening bumiputera participation in key jobs and business, often at the expense of non-bumiputeras. The abuse of the NEP tasked with the noble aspiration of eliminating poverty irrespective of race, saw a new bumiputera super rich political and business class.
This was the continuation of an Umno policy which at its root promoted Malay insecurity allegedly due to the non-Malays and their superior economic position while not doing enough for the poor Malays to lift them out.
It fed the fears of Malays that they would be left behind and gave rise to the erroneous belief that the non-Malays were the prime cause of their problems. The real reasons lay somewhere in between and the failure of the government to lift living standards across the board when it had much resources and a head start to do so.
Abdul Razak’s successor, Hussein Onn, son of Onn Jaffar and whose wife and Abdul Razak’s wife were sisters, came to power after Abdul Razak died of leukaemia in 1976. He was thought of as straight and straightforward.
Under his tenure former Selangor chief minister Harun was charged for corruption and found guilty but not before he turned down an offer to be an ambassador to Indonesia which would have removed him from the political scene but avoided the prosecution.
Harun was pardoned by the king in 1982 after serving three and half years of his 6-year sentence for corruption involving millions of ringgit. The then prime minister - Dr Mahathir Mohmad, who had succeeded Hussein in 1981.
Thus, history shows that a crooked politician had already been pardoned. That was not all. During Mahathir’s tenure as PM, a politician serving a life sentence for murder in 1983 was pardoned and released in 1991. Mokhtar Hashim, a former minister, had originally been sentenced to hang but it was subsequently commuted to life.
Abdullah Ahmad Badawi succeeded Mahathir in 2003. After achieving an unprecedented win in the 2004 elections on the promise of fighting corruption, he backtracked, not even implementing the promised Independent Police Complaints and Misconduct Commission (IPCMC).
There were many complaints about his administration too, including the influence of the so-called fourth floor boys, led by one Khairy Jamaluddin, his son-in-law, and allegations that his son Kamalluddin Abdullah and others got preferential treatment.
After a poor showing at the 2008 polls, as corruption prevailed, Abdullah made way for Abdul Razak’s son, Najib Razak to become prime minister in 2009. Almost from that time, Najib was involved in 1MDB and the trail of disasters which cost the country some RM50 billion in losses. Double that to RM100 billion if you include opportunity costs.
Najib lost the elections in 2018 and Pakatan Harapan came to power after an electorate fed-up with grand corruption rejected Umno/BN for the first time since independence in 1957. Anwar Ibrahim and Mahathir Mohamad were in alliance then to overthrow Najib which they did. But Mahathir had different ideas after he became interim PM.
The Sheraton move of 2020 saw Muhyiddin Yassin, deputy prime minister under Najib and Umno deputy president before the latter sacked him and subsequent ally with Mahathir in Harapan, become prime minister.
He is remembered most for declaring an emergency to stay in power, endangering people for forcing an election in Sabah during Covid 19 and using the Employees Provident Fund’s coffers through withdrawals to stimulate the economy.
Muhyiddin lost power when 15 Umno MPs withdrew support for him and Umno’s Ismail Sabri Yaakob was appointed the ninth PM, returning power to Umno for the first time since 2018. Following the elections of November 2022 Anwar, whose Harapan won the most seats, became PM with the support of Umno, Sarawak and Sabah parties.
It’s plain from this short history, that every PM to date has had a deep and lasting connection with Umno, and occupied a very high position there, being at least at the number two level. They joined the most bigoted and racial party from their youth, a party which promulgated the view to Malays that the others are a threat.
All prime ministers in the country so far have been influenced in the Umno ways and were no different from them, using political power to stay on, to propagate their narrow views and to justify the rise of their business and political cronies to riches without the requisite work.
Paradoxically, that results in the ignorance and the continued poverty of the ordinary Malay who they claim to help because the system is not designed for them. Instead corruption and patronage wastes proper resources instead of growing them for the benefit of all.
If education was a way to lift the masses out of poverty once, it is much less so now because the poor are deprived from a good education due to a sharp decline in standards at government schools which no one is worried about.
Anwar’s corruption fight is hopelessly debilitated by the political consideration of shielding a former PM and a current DPM from rightful punishment under the law, a move which would encourage and perpetuate this evil which lives on the blood of the people.
All this is in the typical Umno mould - sowing the seeds of fear and along with that greed too for the elites. Do anything possible, no matter what, to stay in power and forget about the common people, most of whom are Malays and indigenous people in Sabah and Sarawak.
We must not only reject Umno as Haris advocated but to reject anything which is tainted with the whiff of Umno - all those ex-Umno figures masquerading as fighters for the people and forgetting about them after getting into power.
When we rid the system of anything to do with Umno, truly following ABU and put in power those who have not been associated with that abominable party, then perhaps we can make some real progress in Malaysia.
( P Gunasegaram awaits the day when a true statesman will run Malaysia.)
P Gunasegaram is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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