There is no harm in giving in to desire once in a while, but are you fooling yourself by demanding ‘wants’ as ‘needs’ you are entitled to? Realpolitik will push one malaysia into a new social contract. This will not be achieved by moral lectures to politicians. Rather, a new equilibrium will evolve that enables business to be done honestly in many more areas, while devising alternative ways for politicians to still make big money. This equilibrium cannot be created by any one party or power centre. It will evolve government by government and state by state, just as the old contract did. It is neither a good omen nor a good start for Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s post-13 GE Cabinet. Already Najib’s new Cabinet labours under a cloud of legitimacy for the simple reason that Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s Prime Ministership is under a cloud of legitimacy
Federation of Banking Union Indonesia (FBI) fully support it’s Malaysian counterpart, National Union of Banking Employees (Nube) quest to bring Maybank Group Chief Executive Officer and President, Abdul Wahid Omar and his cohorts to court to face charges for sacking Nube’s Vice President and General Treasurer.
FB1 is fully aware of the violations perpetrated by Wahid and his cohorts in Malaysia, who is wellknown for ‘bullying’ the clerical and non-clerical staffs at Maybank by violating and denying their basic rights.
In fact, FBI observed the Nube picket against Wahid and Maybank in Malaysia last year for intimidating unionists from performing their tasks.
FBI views the whole Maybank “bullying” its workers and the unionist seriously.
“This type of bullying should not be condoned. Malaysian government has a moral responsibility to ensure Maybank comes clean and stop this union busting and undermining workers rights.”
Instead of promoting Wahid to a ministerial position in the Malaysian government, Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak should bring him to task and answer all the wrongdoings during his tenure at Maybank, so that it will be a lesson for all the Maybank executives in Indonesia.
Datuk Paul Low has been a respected civil society leader at the forefront of preaching transparency and accountability while he served as the President of Transparency International Malaysian Chapter (TI-Malaysia). His appointment to the Cabinet has hence raised expectations that Datuk Paul Low will continue his pursuit of reforming all necessary institutions to ensure that his causes while he was the TI Malaysia President will be realised the soonest possible.
It is hence heart-wrenching to see Datuk Paul Low repeatedly unwind the various positions after being appointed as a Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department, ostensibly to boost transparency and accountability in the BN administration.
He has given excuses why a Minister should not be required to make public declaration of assets on the basis that if a Minister’s son with RM20 million of assets may have his safety compromised. This was despite his earlier praise for the Penang and Selangor state governments for implementing public asset declarations for all its state executive councillors as a mark of transparency and accountability.There is no harm in giving in to desire once in a while, but are you fooling yourself by demanding ‘wants’ as ‘needs’ you are entitled to? Realpolitik will push one malaysia into a new social contract. This will not be achieved by moral lectures to politicians. Rather, a new equilibrium will evolve that enables … Read more
He has deflected criticisms of the lack of transparency in Petronas as reflected in the Revenue Governance Index (RGI) where Malaysia scored a weak 46 out of 100 marks, ranking us below countries like Azerbaijan and Indonesia. Datuk Paul Low argued that Malaysia ranked poorly because of Petronas’ non-disclosure agreements with foreign countries. However, when it was pointed out to him that the RGI report pointed clearly to weaknesses in local disclosures, Datuk Paul Low gave a “no comment”.
While we must not abandon our quest for good governance, we must not overlook the fact that the business of government must begin as the election is over. GE-13 has given the Prime Minister and his UMNO-BN the mandate to govern. The voters have in their wisdom also given us a strong Opposition in Parliament. Both the Government and the Opposition must now do their respective duty which is to serve the rakyat. I wish to ask Mr, Netto, how he proposes to “Ubah”? What does he have in mind? More protests? More electioneering?
I would rather abide by His Majesty’s advice that we should accept the election results and move on. As regards to the political future of the Prime Minister, it is wise to leave that decision to the UMNO membership. At the same time, civil society must continue to demand for electoral reforms and transparency and accountability.
Not only are we scandal-sodden, but we are also in state of protest fatigue. Time to go forward, accept the imperfections of the electoral process, seek judicial review, and speak up for reform. We all have a duty to make Malaysia great again. And we can through constructive engagement. Our Government must listen and act with courage and wisdom or it will face the consequences of total rejection
– not only because Najib and Barisan Nasional got 47% popular vote as compared to Anwar Ibrahim and Pakatan Rakyat’s 51% popular vote, but also because the 13GE was the most unfair and dirtiest general elections in the nation’s history. If the 13th GE had been clean, free and fair, with a level playing field for both coalitions, Anwar and PR would not only have an increased popular vote over 60 per cent or even exceeding 65 per cent, but would also have won a majority of the 222 parliamentary seats in the country. Awareness and exposure have widened our horizons, which in turn have expanded our list of needs — and there is no going back. Living the life I do, I do not define my cellphone, laptop, a decent wardrobe, books and car as ‘wants’; they are very much needs as I cannot function without them. And an indulgence gives me the high that makes me feel better about life, so why not? Having established that, it is up to each individual to decide towards which end of the stick he likes to lean — between asceticism and overindulgence. I need a phone, sure, but do I really need a top-end contraption? The same goes for the car, the house and the wardrobe. Each of us needs to set our limitations at both ends as per our comfort and proceed within these set parameters, without guilt. Today’s self-assertive culture is all about stating clearly your desires and wants, and expecting to fulfill them. We have allowed ourselves to imagine we have a right to get whatever we want; this creates a sense of entitlement that makes us selfish and self-centred, blurring needs from wants. It is important to define the tipping point at which a want becomes a need and to understand well the reasons for allowing this walkover. We all wish to cater to our needs, but it is essential that we understand what they are and how important these are to us. Sadly, most of our needs are dictated by someone else. We wish to acquire that bigger mansion, that fancy car or those expensive trinkets all in an attempt to outdo others and prove we are no less than anybody else. What a waste! These are precisely the ‘wants’ that masquerade as ‘needs’. For a need to be genuine, it has to rise from within, be a growl within the system, something that is a must for inner happiness, our very growth, or maybe a one-off that fuels the rest of life! Need is not about others, it is about one’s own self. So whereas it is acceptable that many of yesterday’s ‘wants’ are today’s ‘needs’, one has to be cautious and alert enough to recognise the difference. What are the requirements to satisfy, to complete one’s own self?
The public must by now be feeling so blasé from the endless rounds of the weird masquerading as the normal in the government of Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak that the latest argument that his administration is deeper into weirdo land recalls the humourist who thought he had hit bottom and then heard someone tapping from underneath.
A scandal-sodden public can reasonably be expected to be groggy about the fact that the month and the year when a supposedly transformative PM compounded his cabinet of illicit personnel was exactly 25 years on from the trigger for all subsequent mutilations to what is regarded as the due process of constitutional governance.
This was the impeachment of then-Lord President Salleh Abas, an act of such monstrosity and cascading ill-effects that Abdullah Ahmad Badawi’s attempt, on his prime ministerial watch (2003-09), to mitigate its virulence by offering sops to the wounded and the maimed among the affected justices is rather like Japan’s effort to come to terms with the victims, comfort women and Death Railway inductees, of its imperial past – measly and inadequate.
“Our parents sowed dragon’s teeth, our children know and reap the armed men,” goes a saying of uncertain patrimony but singular pertinence to our current predicament.
A Prime Minister, whom we have good reason to believe is a suspected felon in the cover-up of a murder case no less, is heading a government placed in power on minority say-so, and is now in charge of a cabinet composed of some people who have about as much right to be there as some dubiously obtained MyKad holders had in being on GE13′s electoral register.
The question at this stage is: Can things get any worse and if they do, will we see the removal of the coalition that has been in charge of this country since independence in 1957? Things can and will get worse. This we can predict from what has already happened and will continue to happen.
Recalcitrant cops
You can’t come to acquiring the statistic of a 218th death in police custody of
a suspect since a count of such mortalities was kept since 2000 without there being something pathological in sections of our Police force.
It is a pathology for which there was a remedy, commended by no less than a royal commission of inquiry into the management of the Police force, which suggested, after a 15-month study of the problem, the formation of an Independent Police Complaints and Misconduct Commission (IPCMC).
The proposal, unveiled in March 2005 in a raft of recommendations for the revamping of the management of the force, was stiff-armed by a cabal of senior police officers who threatened to throw their support to the opposition if the government of Abdullah Badawi implemented it.
Talk of sedition – a charge hurled against student, social and political activists with promiscuous ease these days – the action of that coterie of recalcitrant police officers savoured of sedition, because the recommendation emanated from a royal commission, empaneled on authority of the Agong and was aimed at securing improvements to a vital limb of our criminal justice that carries the royal title on its coat of arms.
Depend upon it that could get conceivably worse. You not only have not seen any determination on the part of the Inspector-General of Police and his boss, the Home Affairs Minister, to do anything about this long suppurating sore on our criminal justice system, you have seen the leader of hitherto the shrillest protestant against such perversities join the government after having stunningly agreed to drop, as a condition of his enlistment in the ruling power structure, a demand for a cessation to custodial deaths.
Not only do things stay incorrigible, the government succeeds in enticing veritable watchdogs of good governance to join them in seeing how things can be bettered, the latter agreeing to enlist from the motive that puts one in mind of Dr Samuel Johnson’s observation of a second marriage – “the triumph of hope over experience.”
But often enough, the new enlistees turn over to discover that it is more a situation where drift, inertia and cynicism work their way to keep things the way they are or worse than that. There is no substitute for “Ubah.
These are the additional needs of each individual over and above food, shelter, clothes and sex. We need to keep redefining and adding new ‘needs’ because life demands that we pull ourselves up from the level of bare essentials to a level where we can start thinking of individual development and progress — physical, mental and spiritual. True, no hungry, unsheltered, unclothed man has the bandwidth to think of these realms, but once basic needs are met, we owe it to ourselves and to life to acquire and use the tools that make life and the world a better place for us to live in. But beware of convincing yourself that every selfish want is a need you have to cater to! Do not fight the wants, just filter them before you let them enter the exclusive “Needs Club”!readmoreThe first task that Najib Abdul Razak faced upon being sworn in as prime minister on May 6, 2013 after leading the BN to victory in the 13th general election, was to form the cabinet. Constitutionally, the prime minister does not have a free hand in his choice of cabinet ministers. Article 43(2)(b) of the … Read more
