Thursday 28 Mar 2024
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KUALA LUMPUR (July 30): DAP veteran Lim Kit Siang has disputed Dewan Rakyat Speaker Tan Sri Azhar Azizan Harun's claim that former prime minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin "never asked for the job".

In a statement on Saturday (July 30), the Iskandar Puteri Member of Parliament said the eighth prime minister had asked him for DAP's backing to be the premier in July 2016 — in a "cloak-and-dagger" meeting at the Le Meridien Kuala Lumpur hotel — but he turned it down, as the party was committed to supporting PKR president Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim's bid for the top post.

Kit Siang was commenting on Azhar's speech at the launch of Leading the Nation in Unprecedented Crisis, a book by former Media Prima Bhd chairman Datuk Abdul Mutalib Razak, which focuses on Muhyiddin's tenure as the eighth prime minister.

Azhar in his speech called Muhyiddin "a reformer, whose reformation efforts many choose to overlook, for whatever reason they may have".

Kit Siang instead listed Muhyiddin's "five failures", which included the Sheraton Move, which led to the fall of the Pakatan Harapan government, and his "unconstitutional" declaration of a six-month emergency, as well as his unsuccessful efforts at imposing emergency rule.

The DAP veteran also blamed the former premier for more than two years of Covid-19 in Malaysia, "where Malaysia had the worst health minister in the world, and plunged from a country with a good record to a country with one of the worst records in fighting the pandemic".

Kit Siang added that Muhyiddin had failed to "Malaysianise his political thinking to graduate from a 'Malay first' to a 'Malaysian first' political leader", and had "the largest bloated Cabinet of 32 ministers, 38 deputy ministers, and four special envoys of ministerial ranks".

According to the DAP veteran, Covid-19 had enabled Muhyiddin's government to "hide its weaknesses and internal contradictions".  

"It is difficult to say that Muhyiddin’s political life was one of success for the nation, as he failed as the education minister — for his Education Blueprint 2013-2025 for Malaysia to be above the global average and be in the top one-third of countries in international education standards by 2025 — as Malaysia is [still] below the global average and not in the top one-third of countries in the PISA and TIMSS international assessments.

"The battle against corruption was also a flop. When Muhyiddin was the prime minister, [when] Transparency International (TI) released its Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) 2020 in January 2021, there was a drop in [Malaysia's] score from 53 to 51 points, which resulted in a fall in ranking from No. 51 to No. 57. In January 2022, the TI CPI 2021 was announced under a new prime minister, [Datuk Seri] Ismail Sabri [Yaakob], and the score fell to 48 points, and the ranking fell to No. 61.

"Malaysia is likely to fall to the lowest score and rank since 1995 when the TI CPI 2022 is announced in January 2023.

"But Muhyiddin’s political life, which culminated in him becoming the eighth prime minister, but with the shortest term of 17 months, had one saving factor — his uncompromising position against the 1Malaysia Development Bhd (1MDB) scandal, for which he was dismissed as the deputy prime minister in July 2015, and later sacked from UMNO in June 2016 by [then prime minister] Datuk Seri Najib Razak," Kit Siang said.

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