PHANTOM
......The nation cannot go to the polls following evidence of phantom voters
and a tainted electoral roll.
By : CHARLES SANTIAGO
CARL Wendell, a black poet,
said: “It is easier to build monuments than to make a better world”. And
Malaysia’s former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad proved him right.
The country has one of the
tallest buildings in Asia and yes we can use various other adjectives to boast
about our monuments.
But as the ongoing Royal Commission
of Inquiry (RCI) has proven, Mahathir is the chief engineer of the mess that
Sabah faces now. The inquiry commission, mooted to look into Sabah’s population
explosion, has exposed how undocumented immigrants were used as vote bank for
the ruling coalition to stay in power.
It heard that over 80,000 of
them from the Philippines were issued Malaysian identity cards and another
36,000 are on the waiting list. And some 200,000 citizenships were given to
Sabah immigrants during Mahathir’s premiership in the 1990s in return for
votes.
And this figure could very
well be a conservative estimate.
Sabah’s population grew from
under one million in 1980 to more than three million today. Foreigners make up
28% of that number, a larger proportion than the biggest indigenous group in
the state on Borneo Island.
The revelations at the RCI
are shocking. But it also raises questions about the electoral roll for the
entire country and not just Sabah. Since the 2008 polls, the opposition-held
Selangor’s electoral roll has shot up by 22% compared to a national average of
16.3%.
Some 31,294 voters in the
country have been transferred out of their last parliamentary and state
constituencies without their consent. There are 1,000 voters aged more than 100
and in many instances more than 100 people share the same address.
In the Klang parliamentary
constituency about 2,000 names have been transferred out of the constituency
and another 3,000 names have gone missing from the electoral roll. And about
500 voters residing in a particular Taman have been moved to a neighbouring
constituency.
These facts and figures
concretely show that the electoral roll that would be used by the Election
Commission at the next general election is riddled with irregularities. And the polls are around the corner.
Whether or not Najib is
ready, Parliament will automatically dissolve on April 27 and the prime
minister will be forced to face the voters within two months from that date.
And it’s an open secret that
the next general election would be the most closely fought in the country’s
history, if not the dirtiest. And therefore every vote counts.
Therefore the nation cannot
go to the polls following evidence of phantom voters and a tainted electoral
roll.
RCI For Peninsula Too
As such I support the call
by Bersih chairperson S Ambiga to moot another RCI to look into the allegations
of citizenship for votes in the Peninsula as well.
And I am going to take a
step further and invite Mahathir to support the call for a RCI for the country.
We all know he is hugely
irritated and feeling the heat as the prime mover behind the citizenship for
vote strategy.
But hopefully his angst will
settle and he could behave like a statesman for once. It’s also about time he
stops his nonsensical ramblings about the pre-independence migrants who were
given citizenships.
I am aware of Mahathir’s
mischief and his moronic ways of slamming the Chinese and Indian immigrants who
play a big role in the development of the nation. And we are also too familiar
with his devious tactics of further dividing the nation along racial lines.
Maybe this time around he is
also upset that another blow to his image would act as an obstacle to push his
son, Mukhriz Mahathir, further up the political ladder, inching him towards the
premiership one day.
Whatever it is, as a last
chance to make amends and clear up the mess he created, Mahathir should let go
of stupid demands and lobby for a RCI for the Peninsula.
Or he should stop spewing
venom and retire quietly.
(NOTE
: Charles Santiago is DAP’s MP for Klang)
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