Women must save their country, says Nurul Izzah

KLANG: PKR vice-president Nurul Izzah Anwar has urged women to come forward to “save their country” and for Pakatan Harapan (PH) to pay more attention to the needs of women in the country.

She said it was especially important for women to take up the struggle to change the administration of the country as they made up more than 51% of the voters in the country.

This call was similar to what International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM) lecturer Maszlee Malik said in July when he advised PH to focus on women voters if it wants any chance of securing a victory come the 14th general election (GE14).

At a forum on PH and Barisan Nasional (BN) at Kumpulan Media Karangkraf, Maszlee had said more than half of those who turned up to vote in the last general election (GE13) comprised women and the majority of these women voted for Barisan Nasional (BN).

“Looking at GE13, we see that 52% of those who voted were women and out of these women, 70% voted for BN. The tsunami that PH needs is a women’s tsunami.”

Speaking at a ceramah at the Pandamaran Sports Complex here yesterday, Nurul Izzah claimed that one of the reasons women should vote for PH in GE14 was because under Prime Minister Najib Razak and the BN administration, the education system had suffered.

“The 2012 Pisa (Programme for International Students Assessment) results showed that our 11-year-old children did worse than children in Vietnam,” she said.

“BN has brought our education system down the drain. So how can we allow it to keep ruling?”

According to previous reports, Malaysia was ranked 52 out of 65 countries in the 2012 Pisa, performing the second worst in Southeast Asia and well below Vietnam’s 12th and Thailand’s 47th positions. PPBM president Muhyiddin Yassin was the education minister at the time. -FMT