Embattled Zahid turns language into a political issue

Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi has lashed out irrelevantly and unfairly at Malaysians who can’t speak Bahasa Malaysia (BM). All because he appears a sore loser for getting criticised widely for his poor English delivery when addressing the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York last month.

In so doing, he has unnecessarily taken a divisive and dangerous tack.

He should instead have been gracious in accepting the criticisms. That would have been statesman-like. As the second highest official of the land, he was, after all, expected to give a good showing because he was representing the country, but he faltered.

He was obviously nervous when he gave his speech, he sounded like a fish out of water mispronouncing words (“blue ocean” came out “blue osen”), adding an ‘s’ to the end of singular nouns thus making them sound wrongly plural, and even referring to Najib as the country’s “president”!

Jokes about his performance went viral. One that had me ROTF went: “After hearing his speech, it was so obvious that Zahid Hamidi is MEXICAN!”

Malaysians criticised because they felt embarrassed that someone no less than our deputy prime minister let us down on an international stage. If it had been someone else, probably no one would have cared.

Zahid should have acknowledged that and admitted that yes, his English was not good and that he would make a pledge to improve it. He would have won tremendous respect for it.

Instead, he patted himself on the back when he addressed an Umno division last Sunday. He did admit that “maybe I did not pronounce one or two words correctly” but he was, above all, proud that someone like him who was not educated in any famous school but in Sekolah Menengah Agama Izuddin Shah could address the UN. (One could of course find fault with that kind of reasoning because it sounds like an excuse. Your background doesn’t acquit you if you can’t do the job well.)

He also said he was not bothered or disheartened by the criticisms he got for his UNGA speech. Really?

All right, if he wasn’t bothered or disheartened, then he should have let it be. But he proceeded to lash out at others who have no relation whatsoever to his UNGA performance - Malaysians who can’t speak Bahasa Malaysia well. Why?

Is his English bad because there are Malaysians whose BM is bad? No.

Did they contribute in any way towards making him pronounce English words incorrectly? No.

Does criticising these people in any way absolve him of his incompetent performance at UNGA? An emphatic no.

Let me put it to him clearly so he can understand. If people say your English is not good, you can hit back by saying, “Your English is also not good what!” (if that were true, of course). But it would be inappropriate for you to hit back by saying, “There are people whose BM is not good!” This is because BM is not the issue. The issue is the low standard of one’s English. BM should not be brought into the picture at all.

Childish to bring up BM

If you bring up BM, and it is uncalled-for, you are turning the issue of language into a political issue. Such an act, especially in these volatile times, is divisive and dangerous. And it shouldn’t come from someone who is the deputy prime minister.

Actually, Zahid’s act is not only unbecoming, it actually shows that he was indeed bothered and disheartened by the criticisms.

It’s also childish. He has been blamed for incompetence in English, so now, like a juvenile, he wants to deflect blame on to someone else, so he chose as his target people who can’t speak BM well. Deflecting blame has become the SOP (standard operating procedure) of our leadership, as we have seen in the past several years, and Zahid is perpetuating it. That, however, doesn’t make it any less unacceptable and disgusting.

Why doesn’t he compare himself to Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong who has publicly shown he speaks fluent Chinese, Malay and English? How did Lee become proficient in these languages? What motivated him to be so?

Zahid has not even bothered, so it seems, to better school himself in English, the global language of communication. Now, that’s the difference between a world-class leader and a leader with the mentality of I’m-already-good-enough-and-if-s**t-happens-I-can-blame-others.

Interestingly enough, Zahid’s point about Malaysians who can’t speak BM seems to have been lifted from an article published in The Star last Thursday. It was written by the newspaper’s group managing director/chief executive officer, Wong Chun Wai, and it defended and praised Zahid’s UNGA performance.

After reading it, I slammed Wong on my Facebook page for waffling. He brought up issues totally unrelated to the matter at hand as he desperately tried to make a case for Zahid but failed.

He pointed out the shortcomings of our education system, the hypocrisy of national leaders sending their children overseas for their education, and - here’s the offence - the inability of some Malaysians to speak BM well.

I took umbrage against the last point even then. This is what Wong had written: “However, those who laugh at Dr Ahmad Zahid should first ask themselves whether their command of Bahasa Malaysia is any good as well, let alone deliver an entire speech in the national language.”

I countered: “Wong’s writing shows his failing as a thinker and a writer. I am pretty competent in BM myself, so I don’t feel insulted. But why should BM be brought into the picture here? It’s as if Wong had run out of argument and decided to grab at straws. The danger, however, is that in doing so, he politicises language, and that is something critics of Zahid did not do. The critics mainly pointed out his poor performance in English. It’s important for Wong to think before he writes.”

Did Zahid parrot Wong? If he did, he showed poor thinking in repeating that irrelevant but divisive point. This is not the kind of stuff a deputy prime minister should be made of - Sekolah Menengah Agama Izuddin Shah graduate, notwithstanding.

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KEE THUAN CHYE is the author of the bestsellers Unbelievably Stupid! and Unbelievably Stupid Too! -Mkini