COMMENT | There are lots of Malaysians, including those abroad, who have been waiting for regime change since 1969.

I thought it might happen in 1998 during the Reformasi street protests. It didn’t. Umno’s police bludgeoned the entirely Malay pro-Anwar Ibrahim protest movement.

I was there; witnessed the event as the Asian crisis precipitated the political crisis between Dr Mahathir Mohamad and his protégé Anwar, and what subsequently became the former’s vindictive sideshow.

I thought regime change might happen in 2008. It didn’t. The opposition was nascent then, weak and disorganised. And Anwar was under arrest for Umno-concocted sodomy charges in cahoots with police, the attorney-general, the judiciary and Islamic authorities. Despite Abdullah Ahmad Badawi’s 'Islam Hadhari', fundamentalism was sowing its odious roots.

I was sure of regime change in 2013, or that it’d come close to chucking out Najib Abdul Razak and Umno-BN. But Pakatan Harapan’s predecessor, Pakatan Rakyat, was still nursing bloody wounds from internecine squabbles in 2012 between Anwar’s wife Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail and Mohamed Azmin Ali, while the Umno state endlessly persecuted Anwar for sodomy.

Moreover, Pakatan was struggling to forge unity among its coalition partners. Its manifesto was fancifully overambitious and unrealistic.

And Najib, the Election Commission – an arm of the Umno bureaucracy, as is the Registrar of Societies – kept shifting Pakatan’s registration goalposts and electoral boundaries.

Clearly Umno can only survive through large-scale, state-organised corruption and other forms of duplicity – a position it somewhat developed during its inception in 1946; a position that became embedded in the 1960s and beyond.

Yet Pakatan managed to knock down Umno-BN’s majority by seven seats. It was jolly to see Najib being humiliated by the election result. And it came as no surprise whatsoever that, for his scandalous leadership and suspect credibility, he resorted to scapegoating.

Najib racially vilified Chinese Malaysians for abandoning BN in droves. It’s no surprise because there has always been a racist streak in Najib and his Umno-BN people, much like the black veins on shrimps. Racism is how this repugnant coalition sickeningly seeks its legitimacy. It must be discarded.

If on the score of Najib’s bigotry alone, allowed to perpetuate by Umno’s finger-puppets in the MCA, Gerakan, MIC and other race-based political parties, regime change must happen in 2018. May 9 will be either Malaysia’s hour of light or its second darkest hour since 1969.

And only Malays can spearhead regime change.

Only Malays can do this for another simple but calamitous fact: Najib and Umno-BN have played Malays for years. Malays have been shabbily treated by their own Malay leaders – past and present, and across all establishment parties including backward PAS and the servile Amanah and G25.

Ordinary Malays have been played by these so-called Malay leaders as pawns in politics and the economy. These Malay leaders are rich. Their cronies are rich. Ordinary Malays must ask how.

Ordinary Malays are not rich despite rapid industrialisation since the late 1960s. They must ask why. Why have these Malay leaders left them so far behind?

These are questions centred of Najib’s credibility and legitimacy. These are questions ordinary Malays can no longer afford to ignore or dismiss. Your beautiful country is being plundered in the way Britain plundered it and its other colonies from China and Hong Kong to the Americas.

The real Najib

2015. The real Najib comes through. It’s dark. Darker than night. Apart from the alternative media, Malaysia’s mainstream media would never have dared to disclose the 1MDB crisis that has engulfed Najib. Never. They’re captives of powerful Malay, Chinese and Indian vested interests and lorded by the Umno-Leninist state.

The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and other international media exposed the 1MDB money-laundering scam, as they have, to be sure, other scandals elsewhere, including in their own countries. The people have the right to know.

These stories that broke on 1MDB, and Najib, Jho Low and Riza Aziz, son of Najib’s second wife Rosmah Mansor, weren’t made up.

Last month Riza reached a US$60 million settlement with the US government in the latter’s bid to seize assets stolen from 1MDB. The fact that Riza chose to settle the matter denotes his guilt and hand in 1MDB.

The settlement, without doubt, poses serious direct questions for Najib. He keeps deflecting attention on 1MDB and his role. He has tried to shut down the investigations being conducted by five other countries, including Singapore.

Something else that directly questions Najib’s hand in 1MDB: he’d threatened to sue WSJ for defamation. To this day he hasn’t. Why not, if he was sure WSJ was conspiring to bring him down, his regime, and Malaysia?

The Ponzi scheme was hatched in and directed out of Najib’s Finance Ministry, where 1MDB was incorporated. It bought the Terengganu state sovereign fund for a pittance and turned it into an international outcast, a scam designed to greatly benefit a select few.

Jho Low, who has enriched himself unchecked, courtesy of 1MDB, and on Najib’s watch, has direct connections with Riza. But he remains elusive to authorities pursuing him across the world. That relationship needs further investigation to show who in the Umno regime is complicit.

Besides the alleged pilfering of over US$4.5 billion of 1MDB funds, Najib still hasn’t satisfactorily explained how some US$700 million had lobbed into his two personal local bank accounts.

He has brushed aside accusations of corruption levelled against him. Today, he says he has returned all or “most” of the money to a mysterious Arab, presumably Saudi, donor. Has he?

This, and Najib’s credibility, are seriously laughable on 12 counts.

Part 2: 12 reasons why Malays must abandon Najib

MANJIT BHATIA is a US-based Australian academic, researcher and analyst in New Hampshire.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.