The brickbats thrown at Donald Lim's call for a Perkasa-like Chinese Malaysian movement in recent days is well-deserved.
The brickbats thrown at Liow Tiong Lai's call for an RM1 billion further infusion of funds to Chinese-language schools, on the premise that it will win BN and MCA further support of the Chinese Malaysian voters, is also well-deserved.
Donald's premise
Donald's premise is that an ultra movement claiming to represent "rights" of the Chinese Malaysian community will catalyse the Chinese Malaysian community to rally around the MCA and, therefore, BN.
Donald's logic must have been founded on the perceived sex appeal of Ib and Perkasa.
There is, of course, no foundation to Donald's logic.
How a Vice President of the MCA can make such a call is beyond comprehension.
The Chinese Malaysian community has always been robust, rugged and resilient. It's hallmark is industriousness, adaptability and flexibility. In this regard, the community mirrors all Chinese communities in a global disapora.
If there are any "rights" that the Chinese Malaysians community craves for, it is the right to be left alone (especially from the taxman) and, the right NOT to see its hard-earned tax contributions frittered away by corrupt practices, favouritism and general wastages in the Government and its agencies.
In this sense, is the desire of the Chinese Malaysian community any different from that of any other Malaysian community?
This is the naked truth that Donald is in denial of or, worse still, that Donald fails to see at all.
I offer only one abbreviated acronym that Donald and the MCA needs to immediately deal with: PKFZ.
Deal with that one and, Donald and the MCA can talk turkey with the Chinese Malaysian community or, any other Malaysian community for that matter.
Tong Lai's premise
Tiong Lai's call for an additional RM1 billion funding for Chinese-language schools in Malaysia is wrongly premised. His purported belief is that such a move will garner more support for MCA and BN from the Chinese Malaysian community.
Does anyone actually, seriously believe that?
Again, I offer only one abbreviated acronym that Tiong Lai and the MCA needs to immediately deal with: PKFZ.
Regaining relevance
This will have to come later. Duty calls.... :(
Post March 8, 2008, the great socio-political and socio-economic issues in Malaysia have been laid bare. It does not take any effort to purchase any number of books that have spawn from that Great Wakeup Call.
To reconstruct and reposition itself, the MCA has to do what none of the BN components have been truly able to do to-date - to wake up from the state of denial.
If we ignore the school of thought that inferred that the Great Wakeup Call was due to the sheer attractiveness of Pakatan Rakyat, then, we are left with the other school of thought which inferred that the Great Wakeup Call was a warning shot by the Malaysian electorate over the bow of the BN supertanker.
Why did the electorate do that?
Why did a large proportion of the Semenanjung Malaysia electorate reject MCA and BN?
I am still puzzling as to whether any real post-mortem was done by MCA and its BN brethren. The operative word is "real".
That is why I say that the MCA and its BN brethren is still living in Egypt - a state of the Nile (sic) denial.
Perhaps the sarcastic moniker given by one Sinnathamby Rajaratnam of the Peoples Action Party, who contested and won the Bangsar parliamentary seat in 1964, is still apposite of the MCA. Certainly Tiong Lai seems to think so.
Rajaratnam said that the abbreviated name "MCA" meant "Money Changes All".
For completeness, he also said "UMNO" meant "U May Not Oppose".
He also said "MIC" meant "May I Come-in(?)".
Has anything changed since then?
More importantly, has anything changed since the Great Wakeup Call?
3 comments:
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It was Umno's benign neglect to countermand or respond a'la 1Malaysia to Perkasa that the MCA was targeting. What else can anyone expect the MCA to do? If it had stayed silent, it would be labeled a toothless organization by the very Chinese voters upon whom Umno itself have finally come to recognize as critical to GE13.
Next, take Liow's billion ringgit education aid for votes. Rightly so, the MCA has measured Chinese voter sentiment as predisposed to education matters. Given the federal policy flip-flopping's, substandard academic performances, and monoracial tendencies of the national education administration, there is no reason to think that sentiment is misplaced. Having an MCA minister in the MOE does not relieve the rakyat from thinking that if it was Umno which had decided on the gaming license, then the MCA has only been playing second fiddle in all political matters. That the MCA was an equal partner to Umno in the formation of this nation makes that conclusion even more revolting.
Where the mistake resides in Barisan is to continue to think it can buy votes using voters' own money, especially when the same voters already know it is their money as taxes paid together with those from their companies which have been considerably used to expand the megabillion budgets of Mara and other special Malay educational institutions while Chinese schools as provided by the Constitution have consistently been neglected to such an extent that the DPM has had to pull a figure of one billion ringgit as that which the government has spent on Chinese teachers wages in order to give an appearance of care. But he forgot to give the timespan of the allocation. Was it over fifty three years? One billion ringgit over many many years versus mega-billions over a year?
The rakyat are no fools. And they won't suffer fools for thinking that just by denying there is a shortage of Chinese teachers, the vernacular education system can be strangulated in due course just by cutting off the supply of new teachers.
The tragedy here is that Chinese education is relevant and germane as an additional and increasingly important card for the future of this country's prosperity. We talk about Asia Now and the need to have a sustainable role in a bipolar world of anglo-saxons and east-asians. Chinese education provides us with an additional strategic tool to remain relevant.
Meanwhile, the game is still being played. The cat-and-mouse chase to give semblance of contrition and change while funds are amassed using Chinese funds by tapping their gambling habits to be used in GE13 to buy their votes.
But they have already shown the concept the door.
People will vote with their hearts and their minds and their feet. All of which are clean. If this isn't a blessing for this land, what is?
That the PKFZ case has died down is redolent of how the Mongolian case has been closed without identifying the one who gave the command and also how the Lingam case findings were dissolved.
In modern parlance, the matter has been teflonized.
Somehow the DNA of judiciary integrity has been scrambled to serve political expediency on the vain hope that the messy masses can be made to forget them by introducing other issues from time to time to divert their attention. Misplaced confidence there.
Those are just three of many other cases past and present. Assuredly there will be more in the future because the same setup and arrangement have not been changed.
And that is precisely why the rakyat are weary and wary of Barisan. Besides the usual ultraisms, double-standards, wired deals, outright corruptions, gerrymandering, heavy-handedness against free press, and so on.
Has anything changed since the Great Wakeup Call? No. Why? Because Umno has been trying to keep its status quo by instead thinking it can buy popularity through window-dressing without changing its system.
What about things it has been doing, policy reversals it has made in government, comfort statements it has issued? It must be naive to think the rakyat can accept it has changed because they know it knows those things are what any normal government would have had to do anyway - but didn't until GE12 opened their eyes - because all those years they had thought they could get away with not doing them. The deliberate neglect has been criminal.
The other possibility is that it was really stupid or suffer from low-standard syndrome. In which case the conclusion is equally bad.
A stupid, substandard and untrustworthy government has no call and cause to run this country when the economy is about to tank from neglecting real capability-building for too long.
In a pejorative way, Umno wankered itself silly and brought the country down with it.
So why has the system been maintained? Because to change would mean it has to remove those who wield power over national funds which would in turn require them to be brought on account of their misdemeanors before the hall of justice, its present cheezy state notwithstanding. And that would mean removing themselves.
The rakyat have long ago concluded PKFZ went all the way to the top, and since it involved national funds and federal approvals, it could never have only involved the MCA without the direct involvement of Umno. And who was leading Umno during the time PKFZ was approved and started? Ditto many other big projects. Ditto the Lingam sleight-of-hand closure.
As for the requests by Lim and Liow, it's easy to upbraid them from one angle. But, say, from their respective angles, the requests could be understood.
Take Lim's Chinese Perkasa. The MCA would never have suggested it if Umno's Perkasa had not raised its ante to cast aspersions that the Chinese community should be blamed for Malay deficiency in business, for if the MCA had wanted to suggest it, why only now? It was a reaction to say that if Umno can allow Perkasa to run riot, so too can others, and where would that lead all?
If the RM 1 bil is given and if BN loses in any election, Chinese will be accused of being ungrateful. Doesn't that sounds familiar
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