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YOURSAY | ‘If one's apology is only reserved for royalty, then its significance may be somewhat diminished.’
Trueglitter: It is hoped that Tourism and Culture Minister Nazri Abdul Aziz will not take the forgiveness and compassion of the widely-respected and greatly-admired Johor ruler Sultan Ibrahim Sultan Iskandar for granted, when as a seasoned politician throughout the better half of his life, it should be incumbent on him to be respectful and responsible for all his words and actions as a cabinet minister.
The apparently “recalcitrant” Nazri should gratefully count his good fortune for getting off lightly for allegedly “meddling in palace affairs and linking the palace to politics”.
However, public sentiment is one of total distrust and disbelief towards the sincerity of Nazri’s apology when it has clearly been more than three years since he was embroiled in a war of words with Tunku Ismail.
It is said “a leopard never changes its spots” and in that regard, it has blatantly served to also confirm our worst fears that the seemingly uncouth and atrociously defiant Nazri is seriously being afflicted with an inherent and dysfunctional complex which could best be paraphrased as “those at war with others, are not at peace with themselves”.
The fair-minded public is privileged to take this opportunity to propose a dare to the apparently “untouchable” Nazri to prove that he is endowed with self-esteem and sincerity for his words and action, by also publicly apologising to the immensely successful business tycoon and patriotic Malaysian Robert Kuok for the unwarranted and unjustifiably insults thrown at him.
Anonymous 2436471476414726: The sincerity of a person is commendable when he also apologises to those he had offended irrespective of their social standing, be it an ordinary person on the street, a commoner, a junior politician, a petty civil servant or a struggling businessperson.
If one's apology is reserved for the royalty only, or to one who holds immense power, then the significance may be somewhat diminished.
LR6SO4BK3: Wow, Nazri. It took you three long years to apologise to the Johor royals. How long will it take you to apologise to Kuok, who is an “anak Johor” and who is well respected by the rakyat and Malay elite there?
Tpn: Indeed, when is he going to do apologise to Kuok - in another three years?
David Dass: I wish our policymakers would read this article (by Malaysiakini columnist P Gunasegaram).
I have always been critical of our labour policy. How can a government of a country replace local workers with cheaper foreign workers?
In the early years when Indian and Chinese indentured labour was brought in, the country was sparsely populated and there were insufficient workers to clear our forests, build infrastructure and establish our plantations and tin-mining operations.
That was not the case when we began to import foreign labour from Indonesia, Bangladesh and elsewhere. Indians were 70 percent of plantation workers in 1970. Now they are less than 20 percent.
The Chinese were the construction workers; now it is the Indonesians. In the MRT construction sites, we see Bangladeshis. Our hawker stalls are manned by Bangladeshis and Myanmarese. The quality of hawker food is awful.
Indian restaurants would not exist if not for Indian cooks and waiters. In many Chinese restaurants, workers from other countries serve. And Chinese and Thai masseurs are here in the thousands. Is this good for us?
Most of the money they earn is remitted to their homes to support their families. These five to seven million foreign workers overload our infrastructure, our hospitals and even our schools. Where do they stay? Our rivers and streams become sewers and rubbish dumps.
Foreign workers have spawned huge and enormously profitable businesses for a few, but where are the Malaysians? Are they now highly educated, and have they moved up the employment ladder serving as executives and professionals?
Some have, especially among the Chinese. The government has absorbed many, especially Malays. And many have left the country to work in Singapore, Japan, Taiwan and elsewhere.
But there are other problems. Our dropout rate for schools is high. Many of our young are actually poorly educated.
And where are they? Why do we have such a large number of people in Rela, for instance, when we have so many jobs for foreign workers?
Gunasegaram demonstrates that in some cases, foreign workers earn more than locals.
Economists say that we are caught in the middle-income trap. That means our workers cannot earn more money without an increase in productivity. And that cannot happen without raising the standards of education.
Why do we pretend that our educational standards are the highest in the world when all the evidence is to the contrary? Many employers complain about the low quality of our graduates. And the lack of proficiency in English is another problem that we will not acknowledge and deal with.
If we want to be a developed nation, we must acknowledge the truth about ourselves, and deal with problems that prevent us from moving forward.
Jaded: Spot on, but this again has been repeated before, and until we change the current government, nothing will change. Madness is doing something over and over again and expecting different results.
The sad part is the poor folks in the villages and East Malaysia are the ones that need to understand this, but I doubt that it gets to them. Even sadder and scarier is they are the kingmakers. Unless we change their thinking, the situation will likely remain the same.
Rupert16: Gunasegaram, thanks for pointing out what’s wrong with our country’s economic policy.
But you forgot to add one more thing, and that is, the policies in using cheap labour were also aimed at filling the pockets of those in power and their cronies. This is probably the root cause as to why these kinds of nonsensical policies were implemented.
Vgeorgemy: We lost a generation of youth due to the regime’s economic policies where the rich becoming more affluent and the poor becoming poorer.
This article is giving us the reason to work hard to fix the issues and catch up with the lost opportunities. -Mkini
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