Where do we stand as a nation at
international political arena of late? With all certainties many of us feel
that we are not positioned like we used to be. We used to be observed upon as the most
progressing nation with fast and speedy development that was managed by astute
leaders of yester years who did nothing more than just to see the nation
keeping abreast with other developed or developing nations of the world. We
were ahead of Korea and many other nations in the region as well as many others
in the world but sadly in just over two decades we were far trailing behind
Korea in all traits and facets of a truly well managed nation.
We are even trailing behind new
emerging nations like Vietnam and to some hints that we were slowly overtaken
by Myanmar and few other nations within the vicinity of the region. We were led
by astute leaders with strong cabinet lineup who did not compromise their
dignity with the love for money and wealth that were ill gotten. Leaders of
those years were fully geared to see the nation was managed appropriately and
they were all out sacrificing their souls for the nation right from the day we
achieved our independence.
There was less rhetoric those
days with highly charged slogans. As far as we can reminisce we only had a
slogan, MUHIBBAH as national unity was the sole and ultimate eventual that were
focused to arrive at. However since the eighties were impregnated endlessly
with high sounded slogan which in the end did not materialize organic results for
the nation and its people. We have been stuffed with unyielding slogans while
the country was managed from already bad to an unacceptable level.
Corruptions become the culture
and way of life of leaders with hefty slogans. Leaders with too much slogans
are found out to be leaders with weak attributes just to cover-up their serious
leadership deficiencies. While the clean and amazing slogans were heavily publicized
through mainstream media, leaders were actively doing the opposite practices for
their personal recompenses through huge ill-gotten money in unbelievable sum
from tax payer’s money without qualms or guilt.
We know that leaders with the
culture of corruption and abused of power will never make proper decisions and obviously
we are deep in it currently. As I have said in my previous posting ousting
Najib is one thing but to get proper replacement is another crucial issue that
we are going to face. This blog have emphasized with strong assertions that
changing leadership with the ones who was in the system and culture will never
do any change but just prolonging the ungainly culture that has been ingrained
in them. This is a natural consequence and if that happens we will be in
perpetual problems with evil and harmful leaders for a long while that follow
after that.
We can now smell that there are
efforts by some parties to replace Najib with leaders that have been working
hand-in-glove with the kinds with Najib for many years and still believe in
changing leadership from within the UMNO highest body, the Supreme Council. They
believe it is sufficient to change Najib with the ones who are within them and
this will help us to have another unexceptional mediocre to lead us. That
formula of leadership change has proven to be faulty and has never given us
good answer. Problems persist through and true and we have to be drastic by
having another formula of leadership exchange this time around.
This blog has said uninterruptedly
that only a leader who is not within the current system and culture will give a
good and correct answer to all the glitches that the nation has faced for past
decades.
Like mathematics correct answers to
the leadership problems can only be found with correct formula…and it’s nothing
less.
We need to go back to english education for Malaysians to gain its position of developed progressive, highly learned position and the envy of many ASEAN countries. We lost that footing when we reverted to BM in schools and our people lost the interest to knowledge of philosophy, social sciences, democracy, internationsl politics, history, the arts etc etc. There is just the lack of interest in these kind of knowledge nowadays and that reflects in the kind of rakyats and leaders we have. Just no class. For example we have leaders like this Ikan Bakar seller and money politician with old Hang Tuah rhetorics and the malays buying in into words like BANGSAT. Our old leaders are more educated and are a well read lot and articulated their arguments with deep thoughts and wisdom. I dread our nation is becoming dull and more Zombie like, full of red shirted people. The Malay educationist will hate what I just said. But that's the truth, what this country has become. No class.
ReplyDeleteThere are strong leaders who stamped their lasting mark on the countries that they ruled. Lee Kuan Yew made Singapore what it is today and Mahathir made Malaysia what it is. Good or bad, I don't know.
ReplyDeleteJapan, China,Thailand, Indonesia and many more countries are proud of their own languages. In europe France,germans are proud of their own languages. Germans which is the most advance in technology in the world is not using english. People with colonial mind set are very short sighted like katak bawah tempurung think great of english.
ReplyDeleteChina has directed has directed foreign professional bodies have office in China to set examination papers in mandarin. This is to enable their people to go global with international qualifications...
Malaysia is still struggling whether to use colonial language or malays.this is due to disturbance by narrow minded short sighted and katak bawah tempurung still going around to confuse people..Japanese are more smart because they translate all foreign books into japanese so no issue of english language at all..
Malaysian Politics would not be as corrupted as it is today, if Dr.M had not brought in Anwar Ibrahim into UMNO to garner Malay votes, hence neutralizing the Islamic influence of PAS.
ReplyDeleteIf there are other regrets in Dr.M's political life, associating with Anwar, must have been his greatest.
I think Aspan and 16:40 have seen the writing on the wall.
ReplyDeleteWe have gone over these issues before in many blogs but it is always useful to run them again just to edify new readers. Or those who persist in clasping straws:
1. Our socioeconomic policies
The thrust of these policies to bridge income disparity that is generally perceived to be community-raced has failed because the policies are designed to:
(a) favor vote-getting for corrupt and racialist politicians who then practice money politics which in turn breeds corruption through project patronage which increases costs and reduces income for distribution until today state money is being used to buy the politicians who use state money to buy voters;
(b) favor one race over the others of no lesser needs, thereby creating reactions that merely reinforce the position of the policy-making racialists, and
(c) the same policies ignore you can only improve on income distribution if in the first place you have more income to distribute which means policies for wealth creation must be in place and incentivized first in order for policies for wealth distribution to be run properly.
The issue we have seen with this three-point rationale is that (a) and (b) are entwined, (b) is only growing in numbers but not quality because (a) encourages it to do so by fiat of policy, so that (c) cannot be efficiently executed, furthermore because of corruption and official blackmail by (a).
In a biting way, why should anyone pay 25 percent tax just so that hard-earned money can be stolen by political thugs in advance of distributing to ungrateful layabouts when the business and investment can be relocated elsewhere on 16 percent tax and no political bullshit, social threats, economic mismanagement, outright official blackmail, etc?
2. Family Planning
Family planning has been sacrificed to maintain some outdated patriarchal male supremacy which in turn multiplies more family members who just depend more and more on policies of free income distribution on the sole basis of race.
And these members themselves do the same thing again into their next generations. In a nutshell, geometric progression of extincting disaster over the mid-to-long term lifespan of a nation.
After all, if the numerator of household income is fixed but the denominator of household members is increasing, then the per capita allocation of income for each member will decrease.
It is important to note for any human being to improve, there is a critical minimum mass of support needed. If the per capita income decreases, then nutrition, parental guidance, protection and education will decrease until they drop below the minimum needed for effective result.
In the present situation, the per capita household income is not just not fixed. It is decreasing even faster because goods needed for human progress are costing more, openings for second supplementary incomes have closed, in part by competition from harder-working lower-waged foreign workers, and household debts are increasing which must be serviced and that adds interest costs that reduce the per capita household income.
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ReplyDelete3. Social Demographics
Because of lack of family planning, those who are weak as producers increase in numbers so that the cost of national dependency increases, magnified by the fall of oil and commodity prices which have been staple revenues to fund socially-conscious programs if not salaries.
Meanwhile the future will be even more challenging for the workforce as the 21st century rolls in with new trade competition from other more knowledge-hungry countries which are furthermore unimpeded by socioeconomic misalignments.
It should not be lost on anyone that the future will be more technology-intensive and process-efficient. We are in neither category because the education policies and system have failed forward inasmuch as it has failed backwards as well.
And the present-day crunch is this: the latest public-universities admissions have two chilling statistics:
one, only 10 percent applied for science and technical courses; the other 90 percent went for arts courses. This means we will not have a workforce pool to lead the management and administration of any scientific or technical work environment, let alone researchers trained to innovate. The end-result is that even in the near future, the value-add from new wealth creation so important to sustain income distribution will drop to a negligible quantity; furthermore, parents who are arts-trained are not qualified and inclined to encourage their children to be science-trained;
two, for every five female applicants, only two males applied; this is a gender shift in trainable brains; since religion has entrenched the male position, the future will see more female graduates and from the arts streams inefficiently staying at home to mind the kids while the less educated males also in the arts streams are out staring at the world until they decide to wear red tees to riot against anyone not of their kind just to boost their sense of dignity lost but too ashamed to admit why.
Meanwhile industry and economy die. Because those who are productive will move elsewhere.
4. The Hoi-Polloi
Our society is made up of four groups; 50 percent you can view while sitting in the waiting hall of a government hospital on a busy day; for this group, no amount of knowledge or training is going to improve; their productivity is zero, they are max as consumers and dependents;
The next 20 percent are those who have SPM or assorted curricular papers which enable them to read simple words in fabricated pieces in feel-good mainstream papers or follow scripts unquestioningly in arcane works; they can only do simple processes while closing their minds from anything that will disrupt their self-imposed mental cocoons out of fear what reality will say;
Then the next 20 percent may also have general qualifications but are working to improve their minds and quality of work, realizing they have to work hard in order to save more although that has become increasingly difficult; they are the salt of the earth;
The final 10 percent are those who know, try to create change, open minds, see the world, and reflux wisdom and observations back to try and help the country; in the light of the present obstinate situation, most have given up full-time; some have gone on sabbatical, others have been vilified, threatened, sued, jailed. The works.
We have become a useless inefficient unproductive clueless corrupt hypocritical kleptocratic dictatorship in all but name.
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ReplyDelete5. The Knowledge World
Let's for a start say knowledge is contained in books. But books are only as useful as their contents can be read, understood, propagated and applied.
So where does one find books in this country? How many homes have a fine collection of good books? Veritably nil. How well-equipped are our public libraries? Almost nil on the latest because of budget cuts and that because money was already burned for construction kickbacks to build oddly designed library grounds. You can't even find one copy of Oil Palm Cultivation & Management by Turner and Gillbanks open for public view in the National Library of this country so dependent on that industry.
You used to be able to find the latest management and business books in english in the four book chains of Borders, MPH, Popular and Kinokuniya.
Now the floor space of the first three has been shaved, more titles in Malay but on superficial subjects have been added, and what space remains has been allocated for stationery shelves. If bookstores have declined to this level, isn't it a reflection of the decline of commercial and reading interest - for that matter, ability - of the entire population?
Where else do you find knowledge? In the heads of specialists and industry experts. They are not going to write them down for public sharing because they make their living from what they know and you don't.
So without widely accessible new for that matter useful existing knowledge, what knowledge foundation do we have so that people can learn and improve themselves to world-levels in order to (a) train the others who (b) need to know (c) and catch up faster (d) with the rest of the world (e) who have already gone ahead (f) quietly with, say (g) http://is.gd/9b3mVK ?
For language romantics who after reading the above points (1)-(5) still say the others are retaining their national languages for development and progress so why not us, try:
(i) translating the contents of (g) - you need to do that twenty years ago; can any of the 1,000 translators on the payroll of DBP do that - quickly, accurately, and with contextual understanding?
(ii) after which, try translating to the same timeline the 8,000,000 electronic books and 26,000,000 journal articles that cover the gamut of all commercially useful subjects and expert topics so necessary for a country's citizens to grow awareness of how far we are behind so that they don't waste time sloganeering their stupidity but instead hunker down to study, improve their mind and do some real work for a change?
(iii) then understand we are at sub-ground level while the japanese and germans have already had over two centuries progress of learning from the west for the former and in research for the latter. Why, we are only interested to beat the thais and others? Soon we won't even be able to catch up with the indons (.id above) who, incidentally, are already a handphone-agile fifth column in this country.
Grow and wake up. For the sake of the next generations of youngsters. Pity them for what they will be facing from what our generations have done in the past and today.
This post for Aspan Alias.
And why do we need to continually tinker and reinvent the language and translating the all written knowledge into bahasa which we cannot cope and get the accuracy right and spending lots of money? You cannot compare Malaysians to the Japanese and Germans or to the Indonesians for that matter as you correctly pointed out they are very much advanced. We are not saying bahasa malaysia is not important and has no place in our society. By all means study, research and teach the language. It is a beutiful language full life, culture and wisdom. We also want to catch up with the world and create a truly advance society and productive people. We were ahead before but sadly we are falling back, back to being manipulated with no mind and scruples of our own.
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