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Kit Siang: Najib must quit or end the crisis
The country cannot continue to be in a state of permanent crisis created by the lack of confidence in the Prime Minister.
KUALA LUMPUR: If Malaysia is to move ahead to end the grave crisis of confidence afflicting the country, either Najib Abdul Razak should step down as Prime Minister immediately or he must prove that he and his reshuffled Cabinet can end the drift afflicting the country in the past two months, said DAP elder statesman Lim Kit Siang. “He must prove that he’s capable of formulating and implementing a new blueprint which will restore confidence.”“He should focus on the issues of transparency, integrity and good governance.”
Lim, who is also DAP Parliamentary Leader and Gelang Patah MP, said that this was the greatest challenge before Najib and his Cabinet on Wednesday.
Lim, continuing to express disbelief, said that he was bewildered as to how Najib, who had been in public life for nearly four decades, serving at different times as Menteri Besar, Cabinet Minister, Deputy Prime Minister and Prime Minister for six years, had not realised the gravity of his receiving foreign funds for general elections campaigning in the country.
“DAP had never received a single sen from foreigners in the past five decades, but if we had received such foreign funding, however puny the amount, DAP would have been accused of being anti-national and even guilty of treason,” he said.
In such circumstances, he asked, how could Najib receive any foreign funding for the 13th General Election, and not a small sum, but RM2.6 billion, which is an astronomical figure?
RM2.6 billion, he pointed out, was in fact 26 times more than what was permissible to be spent by all the 222 parliamentary candidates and 505 state assembly candidates of the Barisan Nasional (BN) in the 13th General Elections. “The maximum expenditure which is legally permissible for a parliamentary candidate is RM200,000 while the maximum legal expenditure for a state assembly candidate is RM100,000.”
Lim was welcoming two recent developments i.e. the decisions by Malaysia’s expert in political funding, Universiti Malaya political economy professor Terence Gomez and the Centre to Combat Corruption and Cronyism (C4) not to participate in the National Consultative Committee on Political Funding, chaired by Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Paul Low.
The Committee was just a charade if it is not allowed to deal with “one elephant in the room” – Najib’s RM2.6 billion “donation” scandal, said Lim. “There’s no doubt that the whole idea of the Committee had only one purpose i.e. to shut up inquiries and investigations into Najib’s RM2.6 billion ‘donation’ scandal.”
It was the scandal of Najib’s RM2.6 billion “donation” in his personal bank accounts which was responsible for the 16th IACC being a global public relations disaster for Malaysia for three consecutive days, starting with the Prime Minister pulling out at the last minute from officiating at the IACC for fear of “hard questions, followed by Malaysia’s daily crucifixion over the issue by IACC delegates during the three-day conference, said Lim.
In fact, said Lim, after Malaysia’s unprecedented humiliation at a three-day international conference, and held on home ground, Low should have tendered his resignation as Minister instead of chairing the National Consultative Committee on Political Funding, which lacks both credibility and legitimacy.
-FMT-
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