A badly needed message of hope

Is he sensing the tilting power shift in Umno and aligning himself with Mahathir?

Scott Ng, FMT

Khairy has set Umno Youth on a bold new path, but we’ll have to wait and see whether he’ll be true to his message of moderation.

Khairy Jamaluddin and Muyhiddin Yassin have hit the nail on the head. The speech the Deputy Prime Minister gave on Tuesday and the speech given by the Umno Youth chief coincide on several key points, not the least of which is the emphasis on the need for the party to go down – or rather go back – to the grassroots. They called for an end to useless rhetoric in favour of letting actions speak for the party.

Khairy’s unsurprisingly progressive speech reflects his move towards the middle ground, defensive of the enshrined rights of the Malays but recognizing that Malaysia belongs to both the natives and the immigrants who took up citizenship and, of course, their descendants. And citizenship, he sort of tells us, carries with it a responsibility: citizens are obliged to uplift one another.

The speech looks toward building the youth as a palpable moving force in the Malaysian polity, and takes a brutally honest look at why the Malays have not uplifted themselves despite the wealth of affirmation action programmes dealt out by the government.

Dose of reality

Khairy toes the government line on several points. Nevertheless, his speech is the dose of reality the assembly has been needing for a long time.

Any article claiming to sum up the speech has to view it in the context of its totality, which is a call to national unity. Yes, there was the usual chest-thumping over the need for Malay rights to be respected, the usual spiel about how much the Malays have sacrificed for non-Malays to become citizens of Malaysia, but all this was framed within a call to unity, boldly articulated: “We no longer bring up the matter of the citizenship rights that were accorded, and we accept the fact that our non-Bumiputera friends are people of this country as citizens. My country, your country, our country!”

While it may not be technically true (in fact, it may be an outright lie, but we’ll write it off as over-exaggeration) that there are no Malay voices questioning the citizenship rights of the non-Malays, for this kind of message to come out of an Umno general assembly is nearly unprecedented, to the point of being novel for it’s rarity. Though Khairy did harp a little on non-Malays not respecting the privileges of the Malays, it was nonetheless uplifting to hear an Umno leader acknowledge that this country also belongs to the non-Malays who know no home other than Malaysia. It was a step forward, and one that we could stand to see a lot more often.

His remarks on vernacular education also concurred with some of the opinions previously expressed in FMT columns, largely in regard to vernacular schools needing to do their part in fostering national unity. As previously noted in our columns, vernacular school students lack fluency in Bahasa, a grave oversight as it is the national language and thus the link between Malaysians of different cultural backgrounds.

Khairy’s blunt acknowledgement of the failure of Umno to uplift the Malays was also not disappointing as he did not fall into the familiar rhetoric of Chinese-bashing so common at Umno’s annual assemblies. Noting that there had been “lots of rhetoric” on the issue, he asked where the results were. A good question indeed. He pointed out that this extended beyond education and economy, all the way to social ills that plague newspaper headlines.

But the pertinent question is how Khairy intends to move forward with the issues. This is where his agenda and Muyhiddin’s truly converge – a reinvention of what the party needs to do to remain relevant. Both Muyhiddin and Khairy acknowledged in their speeches that rhetoric was not getting Umno anywhere and the party must return to the grassroots to discover what’s happening on the ground. Observe Khairy’s exhortation to action:

“I want to give all of you a task; a KPI. Please identify how many Malay professionals you have in your division; please count how many Malay contractors receive government contracts in your division; please count how many young Malays enter university in your division; find out how many young Malays are plagued by social ills in your division. Umno Youth will form a special secretariat at the central level to assist with the monitoring and the implementation of the Malay agenda at the grassroots level and introduce a Compliance Scorecard for this purpose. We always have plans but don’t do so well with implementation.”

In essence, Khairy is directing Umno Youth to set foot on the ground and reconnect with the Malay struggle. The struggles of a community change over time, and with the impending implementation of the GST, the removal of the fuel subsidy, the rising cost of living, the inability to afford housing, there is no more pertinent time to redefine what is the struggle of the modern Malay in Malaysia’s troubled socio-economic situation.

But now, we remove the rose-tinted glasses and try to look beyond the speech and at the politics behind it.

We must note that Khairy did mention to reporters that he had to change his speech once the deputy party president finished his at the joint Pemuda, Wanita and Puteri assembly launch as it touched on many topics that he himself intended to address. The political implications of that remark are interesting indeed, especially when you consider that Muyhiddin essentially declared himself Mahathir’s man in his speech last night, which challenged some of the party president’s policies and decisions.

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