Ku Li to retire after term of 13th Parliament ends

First elected to the Dewan Rakyat in 1974, longest-serving MP Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah says he will retire from the House after this parliamentary term ends.

The Gua Musang MP said he will by then be 81 years, and "it will be better to pack up", the New Straits Times reported.

This will be the same for his post as Gua Musang Umno division chief, a position he has held since 1962 (when the division was known as Hulu Kelantan).

However, in an exclusive interview with the daily, Tengku Razaleigh said retiring will not mean it will be the last the Malaysians hear from him, for he will continue to speak on other public platforms.

Among them is Angkatan Amanah Merdeka, a group launched in 2011 to push policy ideas in line with the thoughts of the nation's founding fathers.

This includes the National Stakeholders' Economic Action Plan - or the Amanah Plan - that was launched in September. Among its targets are the abolition of affirmative action that favours only one race, the Bumiputera Economic Empowerment.

Foreign investors, he claimed, were offering funds of up to US$30 billion (RM96 billion) under the Amanah Plan.

Commenting on the recent general election, which saw him doubling his winning majority, he said that BN was having a tough time as it has been "rejected" by urbanites.

"If the thinking people are not with you, it's very tough. You can't rely on the rural votes. Malaysia is 70 percent urban and this will increase over time. The young also voted against us," he said.

Similarly, Tengku Razaleigh said, the BN is not likely to regain his home state of Kelantan, which he had seen change hands from PAS to Umno in 1978 and then back to PAS in 1990.

Embittered by Umno's failure to keep promises

Going down memory lane in the interview, Razaleigh, who was an Umno vice-president at 37 and finance minister at 39, said the Semangat 46 experience left him bitter.

He had founded Semangat 46 following a split within Umno, where he lost by 46 votes in the 1987 conrest for deputy president, which he subsequently challenged.

This led to Umno being declared illegal in 1988, and re-registered as Umno Baru.

In 1996, Semangat 46 was disbanded and 200,000 application forms were submitted to the new Umno.

However, to this day, 36,000 of those applications were rejected despite a public guarantee made by Umno to accept all of them back into the fold.

"The guarantee was not kept... I felt very bitter. It appeared as if I was only thinking of myself and that I walked back into Umno and the others were left behind."