UMNO Leadership Change A Solution To The Malay Malaise?

I received the note below as a response to my earlier posting and thought part of my response worth sharing, including also bringing in the Malaysian context.

Salam Mr Akhramsyah, I, too, have watched Tun's video clip a few nights ago and this is exactly the thing that has been dwelling in my mind the whole next day - even while in office!

As a loyal UMNO member, who still feel that UMNO is the only relevant party for Malays, I think we should try to find some ways to combat the real cause - money politics. Even Tun himself stated in his speech that he failed to combat this problem, when he himself knew that Malay voters will vote even if UMNO president chooses a tunggul kayu to represent them.

Some kind of "Perang Saraf" to change the mentality of Malay voters might be a little too ambitious, but I think, the best is to allow competition for the position of UMNO President once again (after Anwar suggested for "No Competition for the 2 top posts in 1997). Do you think anyone would dare to nominate Datuk Najib against Pak Lah in the next UMNO AGM?

Even though Najib himself is not a perfect leader (more of the lesser of 2 evils), but my naive thinking says that he'd have plans for Malays as opposed to the current PM. What say you?

On this matter, I'd rather not be too quick to prescribe and deliver a solution. Certainly what is said is a problem and certainly the revision in UMNO election laws proposed is one solution. Who challenges Pak Lah is irrelevant, but the system needs to be amended back to the nomination system that was available pre-1988, allowing a minimum 2 Bahagians to nominate leaders for any UMNO national post.

(Else, Pak Lah would have been challenged by KuLi in 2004, which KuLi would likely have lost then in my opinion).

However, there are other root cause problems with the Malays and UMNO that need to be addressed - once we have clarified and prioritised these problems, we should be able to do more than just address the more immediate problem of lack of leadership at the very top. We should try to get Malays to survive regardless of who is on top and in one go ensure the pool of people that can rise to the very top is of the highest quality.

This will also then allow Malays to clarify and re-assert its desired role as the majority race in Malaysia. This would in turn allow us to resume the road that was left post 1969, which Mahathir attempted to put us back onto with Vision 2020 and stalled under the Lah-ist regime, of making the Malaysian status of non-Malays more equitable relative to the Bumiputra.

Needless to say though, regime change has to occur in Malaysia after these elections in my mind. The current government is just too incompetent to remain as it is for all our sakes as Malaysians!

I remain, a loyal UMNO Member of Bendang Baru Branch, Langkawi.