KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 15 ― Malaysia will not be able to achieve its full potential and stand tall among its regional peers if all Malaysians here are not given the chance to contribute, the country's second prime minister's former aide Tan Sri Abdullah Ahmad said.
Abdullah said Malaysians must discard their racially-tinted lens when speaking of other citizens from different ethnic groups to enable the nation to progress.
“Until we do that, unless we recognise the talents of everybody ― not just recognise, you must use it, exploit it, Malaysia will never reach our potential,” the former political secretary of the late Tun Abdul Razak Hussein Al-Haj told a forum yesterday.
He was answering a question from the audience on how pride can be reinstilled in Malaysians against the backdrop of a country falling behind its neighbours such as Singapore.
But Abdullah later claimed that Malaysia was kept from fully tapping into the talents of all by a “sense of insecurity”.
“You must let everybody contribute. Everybody has a place in this Malaysian sun. The country is so rich, why are we not doing this? Because there is a sense of insecurity.
“And they perpetuate this sense of insecurity so they can keep on dividing you and you fall into it. That is our tragedy,” the 78-year-old said, without naming those allegedly spreading insecurity.
Abdullah observed that race-based politics and political parties are becoming further entrenched in Malaysia, predicting that the Bumiputera would account for 70 per cent of the country's population by 2030 and present additional challenges as Islam becomes a more prominent factor in political debates.
It would be “very difficult” for Malaysia to move from an approach based on race and religion to one on ideology unless there is a “strong government” in place, Abdullah said, adding: “But there will be nobody who have the political will today”.
In retracing Tun Abdul Razak's contribution through his economic policies, Abdullah said the then prime minister had wanted to close the income gap in the country.
“Razak's idea was to level up people, not to pull the rich people to be poor, but to bring poor people to level of decent living,” he said, adding that urban poverty remains to be tackled after the government's relative success in trimming rural poverty.
Earlier in the forum, Tun Abdul Razak's political contemporary and rival Lim Kit Siang spoke about the New Economic Policy (NEP) introduced by the Umno leader in 1971.
Lim recalled putting forth the party's views that it supported the NEP's two-pronged goals of eradicating poverty and to restructure economy to end the identification of race with economic functions.
But the DAP had cautioned that the economic policy could be abused, Lim said, adding that it has been indeed abused to benefit only a few Umno-linked individuals.
“As a result it became very divisive and the policy was perceived as a policy aimed against only non-Malays but actually only benefiting certain Umno leaders only,” the 73-year-old claimed, adding that the wealth gap between the Malays would be raised in parliamentary debates over the country's 11th Malaysia Plan.
Lim remembered the first three prime minister's administrations - including Tun Abdul Razak's - as periods where there was “respect for the rule of law”.
He also said that under their leadership, Malaysia's position as a “democratic, liberal, multiracial, secular nation with Islam as the religion of the federation was never questioned”.
The forum last night titled “Remembering Tun Razak” was organised by DAP's Malay-language news portal Roketkini in conjunction with the 39th anniversary of his death.
Tun Abdul Razak, now remembered in the footnotes of history as the nation’s Bapa Pembangunan (Father of Development), took over the reins of the country on September 22, 1970 at the age of 48.
He passed on due to leukemia on January 14, 1976, leaving behind five sons ― including the current prime minister of Malaysia, Datuk Seri Najib Razak.
