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COMMENT | When the Alliance coalition under prime minister Tunku Abdul Rahman assumed power as our first government on Aug 31, 1957, Dwight D Eisenhower was president of US, Nikita Khrushchev and Mao Zedong were the respective supremos of the Soviet Union and China, Harold Macmillan was prime minister of the UK, Jawaharlal Nehru the prime minister of India and Sukarno the president of Indonesia.

In the decades that followed, the US presidents and UK prime ministers have rotated between their two major political parties. Nehru’s Congress party lost power at the ballot box in 1977. Sukarno was overthrown in an army-sponsored coup in 1965. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The only political party among these randomly selected nations that is still in power today is Mao’s Communist Party of China.

Yet in Malaysia, 13 general elections and 60 years later, that coalition, known since 1974 as Barisan Nasional (BN), is still in power. The Umno-led coalition is the political grouping with the greatest longevity in the world, ruling continuously and without a break for 60 years.

It follows that all the ills that plague the nation, whether politically, economically, socially or otherwise, are the result of Umno’s stranglehold over the nation.

They are principally to be blamed for racial and religious polarisation; endemic corruption; centralisation of power in the office of the prime minister; the lack of independent, impartial institutions intended to act as checks and balances over the power and influence of the executive; the increase of Putrajaya’s influence to the detriment of the 13 states, and so on....

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