As polls loom, Najib warns women against empty promises

By Shannon Teoh

August 25, 2011

KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 25 — Datuk Seri Najib Razak called on women today to be wary of politicians who make unrealistic promises when campaigning for office.

“When running for office, you tend to promise the sun and the moon.

“So never judge a politician on what he says during elections, only what you think is realistic,” the prime minister told an audience of about 2,000 female community leaders at the national Women’s Day celebration here.

Talk of snap polls has grown despite the Najib (picture)administration promising a parliamentary select committee on electoral improvements to be formed in October.

The Barisan Nasional (BN) chief has insisted that the timing of elections is not tied to the panel’s six-month lifespan and Putrajaya has also allocated RM1.4 billion and RM2 billion in the past few weeks to welfare and bonuses for civil servants and pensioners.

Najib’s warning today also comes on the back of the opposition’s promises such as cutting government expenditure by tens of billions of ringgit and giving taxi drivers individuals licences to save them RM1,500 per month as part of an alternative budget for 2012.

PKR is also pitting its president Datuk Seri Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail against the prime minister’s wife Datin Seri Rosmah Mansor as an alternative role model for Malaysian women to aspire to with a six-part pamphlet on the wife of Opposition Leader Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim.

This follows from Wanita PKR’s ongoing grassroots campaign to take on its Umno counterpart in villages and plantations as it seeks to break the ruling party’s stranglehold on rural female voters and gain what it sees as a critical 15 per cent swing of Malay women in its hopes to claim federal power.

Najib told the delegates to the Women’s Day celebration that his administration was committed to developing the role of women in the workforce as it could not neglect “50 per cent of our potential” in pursuing economic growth.

The government has targeted an annual GDP growth of six per cent to reach developed nation status by doubling per capita income by 2020.