KUALA LUMPUR (July 14): DAP veteran Lim Kit Siang said if Malaysia wants to avoid the “failed-state” example of Sri Lanka before Malaysia’s Centennial in the coming decades, then Malaysia must undergo a national introspection as to “What Went Wrong” with the country.

In a statement on Thursday (July 14), the MP for Iskandar Puteri said among the mistakes made in nation-building policies and principles in the last half-a-century causing Malaysia to lose out to more and more countries, including the likely prospect of losing out to China and Indonesia by the end of this decade in the Transparency International Corruption index included the failure to accept that Malaysia is a plural society as well as doubts about the doctrine of separation of powers and the supremacy of the rule of law.

The DAP elder also highlighted worsening of corruption, declining educational standards as well as deviations and abuses of the New Economic Policy as factors affecting nation building.

He also raised the issue of the first Malaysian diaspora where over a million of the best and brightest Malaysians emigrated to make other nations great instead of Malaysia great.

“We have increased our national per capita income by 30-fold from 1970 to the present day but we have increased by more than 63,000-fold the corruption and financial scandals in this period, as illustrated by the RM100 million Bank Rakyat scandal in 1979, the RM2.5 billion Bumiputra Malaysia Finance (BMF) scandal in 1983 and the RM42 billion 1MDB scandal in the last decade.

“I have maintained that the most important question in Malaysia today is not who will win the next general election but whether Malaysia will become a failed state before Malaysia’s Centennial in the coming decades by avoiding Sri Lanka’s fate with a reset of nation-building policies and principles,” he said.