Our Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi never ceases to amaze me. Even in the last leg of his tenure, he is still telling lies which any one listening to would know is an outright lie.

His recent statement that ‘anyone can be prime minister' in Malaysia really tops the mother of all his lies.

How could anyone from a minority race - either an Indian, Chinese, Iban or Kadazan etc, - be accepted as a PM when the simple appointment of a Chinese woman to be the acting general manager of PKNS could create such a ruckus?

Where was our PM when the hue and cry over that appointment took place? Not even a whimper from him and yet he has the gall to tell his audience that 'anyone can be PM’.

What about in Perak after the recent general election wheb DAP won the majority of the state seats?

Instead of a Chinese assembly person from the major winning party being given the menteri besar’s post (which by convention should have gone to the party winning the most seats) it was instead given to Malay assembly person whose party only won a few seats.

Malaysia has a long way to go before it can emulate what Barack Obama has achieved in America.

Umno and our present Malay leaders are too deeply entrenched in their Ketuanan Melayu policy that it is unlikely they will ever discard this race-based ideology that has served them so well for the last 50 years.

Even the mere mention of the weaknesses of this policy has brought the wrath of the Umno leadership on the erstwhile former law minister Zaid Ibrahim.

What more if there is any concerted attempt to abandon this policy in favour of one that does not discriminate against race, colour , creed or religion?

Americans have the shown to the world that they have moved beyond politics based on race and that even a miniority race member can become the president of the world's most powerful nation .

Unfortunately, in Malaysia we are still mired in racial and religious bigotry. Instead of uniting the various races with a multi-racial policy, they have instead embraced a divide-and-rule policy.

This is a policy which emphasises the bumiputera and non-bumiputera dichotomy. And after 50 years of BN rule, our nation has never been more vulnerable.