Home minister, yes we understand what you're saying

Home minister, yes we understand what you're saying

S Thayaparan
Published: Nov 24, 2025 8:02 AM
Updated: 11:02 AM



“FAM was not a party (to the document forgery).”

- FAM’s Geneva-based legal counsel Serge Vittoz

“(The seven heritage footballers) have enough Bahasa Malaysia knowledge, or as described by Jerlun (MP Abdul Ghani Ahmad), sufficient. Meaning that they can understand what we say.”

– Home Minister Saifuddin Nasution Ismail

COMMENT | What is fascinating about the “heritage” players fiasco is that it exposes how the Madani state deals with two important issues.

Mind you, these are legacy issues, but the fact that they are legacies which Madani unashamedly embraces reminds those of us who voted for this unity government that things are going to get much worse.

The first issue deals with the defence of the realm. The forged documents the Football Association of Malaysia (FAM) sent to the International Federation of Association Football (Fifa), which were endorsed and defended by the home minister, demonstrate that Madani continues to enable elements in the government or factotums within various bodies to jeopardise national security.

Youth and Sports Minister Hannah Yeoh desperately wants the federal government to remain out of this debacle, because this would be an indictment against her ministry.

Youth and Sports Minister Hannah Yeoh


What exactly has she been doing besides attempting to deflect on behalf of Madani?

She is hoping the DAP base will turn a blind eye, but if her ministry were run by Umno or Perikatan Nasional, the base would be rightly questioning what her ministry’s role is in all this.


Bureaucracy continues to enable illegality

With all the corruption issues with immigration, the connective tissue always seems to be the National Registration Department and, of course, high-level political operatives.

Officials within the government bureaucracy continue to enable and protect activities which are dangerous to the defence of the realm, and of course, large sums of money are involved.

What the “heritage” players’ scandal exposes is how incompetent elements who engage in such behaviour have become.

Does anyone in the government realise how dangerous this situation is, or maybe they just do not care?

Here we have state actors forging documents, and the state, for whatever reason, going along with it.

This deals with football players, but what other documents have been forged and passed unnoticed by either the NRD or the Home Ministry?


Severe gap in national security

Who has been allowed into this country using falsified documents which passed the screening of the Home Ministry?

Think about this, the only reason why this type of institutional dysfunction has been exposed so clearly is because of the scrutiny of an international body, which, by the way, has dodgy scandals of its own.

Whenever I read about institutional dysfunction like this, I always go back to Wang Kelian.

Wang Kelian could not have happened if there was no collusion between crime syndicates, the state security apparatus, and most importantly, the political class, who were needed to facilitate and give legitimacy to a cover-up.

We are talking about high crimes perpetrated by local actors working in concert with foreign high-ranking officials.

Rational people are dismayed by this “heritage” players fiasco, but the scandal goes much deeper.

While this scandal makes for good coffee shop rants, it reveals how state actors are endangering the defence of the realm for whatever reasons, and the political class continues to enable them.


Weaponising BM

The second issue is the use of Bahasa Malaysia. For decades, the national language has been weaponised against the non-Malays.

READ MORE: 'Heritage' players don't speak BM, but passed citizenship language test: Fifa


Political agitators continue propagating the idea that certain people cannot speak BM adequately when the reality is that non-Malays have contributed to the economy and development of this country, even though we supposedly speak poor BM.

All this propaganda about the national language is meant to bash the non-Malay community. The fact is that whenever all these people accuse citizens of not speaking Malay properly, it is merely because they really do not have anything else to bash the non-Malays with.

This all shows that the Malay uber alles types really do not care about BM except when it comes to bashing the non-Malays.

Politicians have always used language to divide, especially along class lines, because it is easier to maintain hegemony when one side thinks that the other does not use the language of the state.

All Malaysians communicate in this language every single day. We communicate in BM, not due to a patriotic impulse but rather because this is the language that cuts through class and race.

On social media, you get agitators questioning everything from the patriotism to the national language fluency of the non-Malays. This is all part of the greater narrative of the political class, which uses language and any other issues to demonise the non-Malays.

Not for one minute do those who question the patriotism of non-Malays reflect their gaze on the behaviour of the political class and state actors, whose actions I would consider treasonous, destabilising the defence of the realm.

Here is the truth: even so-called champions of BM and state religion are willing to throw BM under the bus if it suits their agenda, like what happened in this “heritage” players’ case.

As Home Minister Saifuddin Nasution Ismail said, they can understand what “we” say. Rational Malaysians understand what people like him say. We always have.

S THAYAPARAN is commander (Rtd) of the Royal Malaysian Navy. Fīat jūstitia ruat cælum - “Let justice be done though the heavens fall.”

***

One of Commander's best articles, and a very important one for national security.