UMNO : Big membership – Does it help?
Aspan Alias
I used to propose unalike opinion over the issue of UMNO membership in my regular UMNO Divisional Committee meetings years ago.
Every Division was asked to register as many Malays as possible to be members of UMNO in order to strengthen the party by the numbers.
The leaders believed that by having massive membership would make the party strong as the numbers alone can make the party walk tall in any election against the opposition with small party members.
I was strongly against the idea of having mammoth and massive membership for the party as it would bring more negative than positive consequences in the end.
As usual, ideas that came from me or anyone like me would be instantaneously brushed off.
BUT I still hold to that idea of smaller party membership, like 1.5 million is reasonable numbers. The big and gigantic membership list is part of the problems the party faces at this instant.
To my simple minded argument, having big membership, the Division has to set up many new branches and that would be stickier as it is hard to manage the idiosyncrasies of members at the branch level.
At that time, UMNO memberships had grown up to almost 3 million nationwide and that formed almost 40% of the Malays in the peninsular Malaysia.
