RETIRED DAP supremo Lim Kit Siang has taken a jibe at Opposition leader Datuk Seri Hamzah Zainudin for what he described as a “third mistake” of critical omission in his maiden speech in the Dewan Rakyat on the 2022 Transparency International (TI) Corruption Perception Index (CPI).
Yesterday (Feb 17), the 81-year-old veteran lawmaker claimed that the Larut MP had made two mistakes on Tuesday (Feb 14), namely:
- Failing to provide check and balance during the half-hour Prime Ministerial question time; and
- Failing to pass the Yang di Pertuan Agong’s test in the Royal Address Motion to ensure political stability for the next five years to allow the country to unite a very polarised plural nation, and to reset and return to the original nation-building principles to become a first-rate world-class nation.
“Is this because his reference to the TI CPI 2022 will reflect on the failures of two ‘backdoor’ governments of (Tan Sri) Muhyiddin Yassin and (Datuk Seri) Ismail Sabri (Yaakob)?” asked Kit Siang in his latest blog.
“Do we have an Opposition leader who is afraid to raise the issue of corruption in Parliament? If Hamzah is afraid to lead the anti-corruption campaign in Parliament, then Malaysia needs a new Parliamentary Opposition Leader.”
According to the former Iskandar Puteri MP, the TI CPI 2022 is the best evidence that Malaysia has regressed to become a second-rate mediocre country after six decades and is in danger of being lumped together with other failed and divided states in the world over the next few decades.
“An Opposition serious about performing its task of providing effective check and balance to the government-of-the-day would make the TI CPI 2022 one of the chief planks to demand a report and plan from the government to stop Malaysia’s decline in the TI CPI series,” opined Kit Siang who himself was the country’s longest-serving Opposition leader during which he held the position for a total of 29 years on three separate occasions.
“The best attempt in the last three decades to check the decline of anti-corruption efforts was in the 22-month Pakatan Harapan (PH) government before it was toppled by the Sheraton Move political conspiracy which brought in two illegitimate ‘backdoor’ governments.”
Malaysia’s TI CPI 2019 was the best anti-corruption efforts in 25 years since Transparency International started its annual Corruption Perception Index series in 1995.
During that year, Malaysia achieved a score of 53 out of 100 marks with a ranking of 51 out of 180 countries as compared with Malaysia’s TI CPI 2017 when it had a score of 47 out of 100 with a rank of 62 out of 180 countries.
“The two “backdoor” governments of Muhyiddin and Ismail Sabri could not continue with the anti-corruption efforts of the PH government to achieve better results than the 1995 TI CPI but were responsible for another plunge in TI CPI to the lowest score in a decade, ie 47 out of 100 marks and 62nd ranking out of 180 countries,” added Kit Siang. – Feb 18, 2023
