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The Home Affairs Ministry, as far as I know, is to be tasked with defending the nation’s borders against all enemies of a military nature either foreign or domestic.

In this role, one would expect the minister to be colour-blind out of the need to consider each and every Malaysian’s life as part and parcel of his responsibility to maintain security.

While it is true that our security forces within Malaysia include the Royal Malaysian Police, Customs and even Immigration, it should not be made into a political grandstand, especially in the period of celebrating our Independence and Malaysia Day celebrations.

This being said, I personally find it irresponsible for Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi to suddenly come out and say that our non-Malay population – which includes the Chinese Malaysian and Indian Malaysian population, and even the non-Malay bumiputeras for that matter - are arrogant for forgetting that they are indebted to us?

We are now a 57 year old nation of mixed heritages - Indians, Chinese, Malay, Indonesians and so on - with almost two generations of Malaysians born after Merdeka and Malaysia Day. Do we really need to call them “arrogant” and consider them “indebted” to us for citizenship during the pre-independence era?

Those IOU notes should have expired the moment our prime minister went out and urged 1Malaysia.

At a time when you even have our prime minister making speeches asking for Malaysian unity, why is a minister in his cabinet - who is in charge of internal security, no less - making statements to agitate every single other ethnicity in the nation?

I understand Zahid is a politician who is an Umno member, but truly there are more pressing agendas other than race or religion that need to be solved to the betterment of the Malay Malaysian quality of life in his role as home minister.

The minister must remember that when he speaks at any event, even it is hosted by Umno, he is speaking on behalf of the entirety of 30 million Malaysians of diverse ethnicities who depend on him to guarantee national security.

As such, to come up with such statements and to probably later defend himself by saying that it was an Umno event goes to show that he has prioritised his own political party ahead of the entirety of the nation’s well-being.

Dearest minister, you are doing now is nothing more than embarrassing your voter base. Your supporters will defend you to the core, but in the end, you are not helping yourselves win anyone else’s hearts and minds.

And if this is the case, then perhaps the prime minister needs to pull yet another one of his cabinet members and do some fire fighting, similar as to when our Federal Territories minister did his ‘no soup kitchens in the Golden Triangle’ faux pas.

To Umno ministers, the political campaign is over for the next three years. Now that you are the government, you represent everyone. Keep your tengkoloks and keris, put on your best hats and start making statements that represent Malaysians as a whole, if you could?

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