PKR leader Dr Tan Kee Kwong today derided conspiracy theories claiming that the country’s recent deluge of problems is the result of a plot by our enemies, as the “consolation of kids, not the realism of matured adults”.

Referring to the gloom enveloping the country from being beset by three aviation disasters this year, plummeting oil prices, and calamitous year-end floods, the MP for Wangsa Maju said perhaps it was inevitable that some people might want to attribute the spate of disasters to “outside forces that supposedly have log nurtured evil designs on Malaysia”.

“We just don’t matter that much in the global scheme of things to warrant such speculation,” said the former Gerakan vice-president and deputy minister in the BN government, who joined PKR in 2009.

“True, this year our troubles have borne down on us in trebles and quadruples, bearing truth to the saying that when it rains, it pours,” commented the medical practitioner.

“But frankly, we have been asking for it,” Tan added bluntly.

“Everywhere in the world, the people who do well are the people who have respect for merit and excellence and those standards when upheld are responsible for their success,” he argued.

“In Malaysia, we allow race and religion to distort our sense of what is meritorious and excellent, such that we do not any longer know what those essentials for progress really are or mean.

“Eventually, we wind up with disaster, one after another - a compounded situation with the amateurs among us crying that it is all a grand conspiracy, and the rest too weary even to say ‘I told you so’,” he expatiated.

'It is not too late yet'

Tan said it is not too late to roll the stone up the hill and that the people must realise this cannot be done by an Umno-BN government decayed beyond all hope of redemption.

“They have been in power too long and have to be retired because they simply cannot be expected to lead the country out of the morass into which it has fallen,” he claimed.

Tan said the confluence of pathologies - social, political and environmental - that the country is facing, can only be solved by leaders who are relatively free of the shackles imposed by the “ruling elite’s exploitation of race and religion”.

“There is a much higher number of these freed leaders in the opposition than there are in the government or on its fringes,” he opined.

“They have to be given the power to turn things around, as other matters are coming to a head and will leave the country and citizenry down for the count,” he elaborated.

A similar warning to Tan’s admonition about the metastasizing mess was aired earlier this week by Borneo human rights leader Jeffrey Kitingan.