Is Raja Petra’s Real Motivation Power?
Sarawak Reports
Raja Petra Kamarudin, a blogger and longtime radical in Malaysia, has been a long-time critic of the country’s leadership saying that it’s time to overthrow them and usher in change by supporting the opposition lead by Anwar Ibrahim. As his rhetorical assaults against Sarawak’s Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud and Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak make clear, Raja Petra’s agenda is promoting the overthrow of the current leadership.
As Raja Petra would tell it, he is doing this for the good of the Malaysian people. His real motives, though, may be entirely different.
Raja Petra has expended a lot of effort criticizing Chief Minister Taib, characterizing him as a greedy, corrupt politician who is using his position to exploit his people and destroy the state’s environment. The real story of Sarawak is quite different. Under the leadership of Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud, Sarawak has undergone an impressive economic transformation, from an economy almost strictly focused on agriculture to a rising economic player in east Asia, especially in the technology and green-energy sectors.
Among Raja Petra’s associates is a longtime left-wing agitator in the United Kingdom who trades on her familial relationship with the former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown to punch well above her weight in international affairs. Petra, Brown and other critics have ignored the incredible growth and modernization that has come to Sarawak under Taib’s leadership. In the mid-1980s, Chief Minister Taib faced a Sarawak where nearly 32% of its population lived in poverty, a shocking statistic to anyone living in the Western world. In three decades of democratic leadership, Taib has helped pull his citizens out of the depths of destitution. Now only 5.3% of Sarawakians live in poverty. For comparison, that is less then half the amount of Americans who live below the poverty line, a startling feat.
So why does Raja Petra so vehemently seek the overthrow of successful economic policies like those of Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud? Perhaps it’s a matter of power.
