PH is looking in the wrong direction for support

By Stephen Ng

The Pakatan Government, especially component party Bersatu, needs to understand that the last general election was won with the support of a majority Chinese, Indian and East Malaysian votes.

Only 30% of the Malays voted for PH in the last general election. To therefore submit to the political narrative of the other 70% Malays who voted for Pas and Barisan Nasional is a big let down for the voters like me who helped to put PH in power.

Whether the PH remains in power in the next general election will depend largely on where the current supporters put their votes. With just a slight shift in the voting trend, PH can be thrown out of Putrajaya.

With such a precarious situation that PH is finding itself in, I find it hard to understand why it is still playing the old politics of trying to appease BN supporters at the expense of those who have supported PH.

When the recognition of the Unified Examination Certificate (UEC) was brought up, just some noise made by Umno Youth was enough for the spineless Education Minister Maszlee Malik to withhold the recognition under the pretext of doing a holistic study.

Now, the government is contemplating the ratification of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD).

It is yet to be seen if the PH government would go ahead to do what is right or it would bow to political pressure from the Opposition.

Many of us are shocked at how former Umno minister, Rais Yatim can now turn around and say that the Ketuanan Melayu was never in the federal constitution, and that it was only a "political battle cry".

Was he not one of those who pushed for the Ketuanan Melayu agenda to the point that it destroyed the country's social fabrics? 

Supposedly graduated with a PhD in law from the University of London, he was spiteful in the way he spoke to a reporter. This is obviously the attitude of a supremacist Malay, who should not have studied in Great Britain. 

If he could not respond to a question in English in the way many other ministers responded to journalists with decorum, he should have obtained his PhD from some universitas in Indonesia. It was unbecoming in the way he behaved when he was later appointed a minister of culture. 

In fact, what kind of culture did he represent with his (using his own words) mulut celupar? This is the Ketuanan Melayu that he was portraying all along.

  

It would have been a disaster had Rais been picked as the parliamentary speaker. I cannot imagine him speaking like this in the august house. The present speaker, Mohamad Arif Md Yusof is far more honourable.

Back to the PH manifesto. Surely anything that the PH government seeks to do, Umno or the lone ranger in MCA would create a ruckus. There will be demonstrations. After all, this is what Umno has been training its men and women to do.

Their objective, of course, is to create dissatisfaction of the rakyat towards Pakatan Harapan and to win back Putrajaya. PH will never (I repeat, will never) win these hardcore Umno and Pas supporters. Their intention is to derail the policy drawn out by PH.

But for many of us, it is unlikely that we would vote for Barisan Nasional at least in the next general election. We know that the moment BN is back, people like Najib Abdul Razak, Rosmah Mansor, Shafie Abdullah and their cronies would go scots free. The nation's wealth would be plundered again.

No, we won't vote for BN unless PH fails us in fulfilling the promises made in the manifesto. We won't vote for BN unless BN has reformed itself and proved to be more capable to run the country, this time with the help of men and women of integrity. The old hats cannot be trusted to run the country.


END.