Tun Mustapha-pix by courtesy of madeinsabah.wordpress.com
This is an email from my old friend, titled: Keep the fire burning his response to my column two weeks ago-Daily Express. How will the 2 million voters decide next time?
Our young and their education
JJ writes
Its been quite sometime that we havent communicated with each other apart from the very brief encounter at the coffeshop towards the end of last year. Well, I m really pleased to have stumbled upon your article this morning in the Sunday Daily Express while waiting at the car wash. FYI, in fact I ve stopped reading the Daily Express and turned to the Borneo Post instead because I found the DE to be too rigid and unflavourful in its orientation, while the New Sabah Times have the tendency to glorify only certain individual - I suppose you know who I m referring to.
Anyway, ideals aside, I managed to read your “very down to earth” article twice and I whole-heartedly agree with every bit of your ideas. I would like to further add on two issues, i.e. the voters and education, for these two have what I would call a very “intimate” co-relations. Firstly, in the last General Election where I was assigned to work on the ground in the Interior/Pensiangan area by my employer (as usual), I observed that the young voters i.e. the youths were not properly taken care of in terms of everything. By “everything”, I mean their eduaction (post primary/secondary where many are school dropouts) not withstanding quite a number who have never got the chance to go to school; their lack of knowledge, exposure and sensitivity towards both local and global isssues, which may lead to political “illiteracy” on their part; and of course, the lower level of maturity as compared to their counterparts in the more developed areas of the Nation.
Our leaders heading where?
If we carefully synthesize the afore-mentioned issues, they obviously would have a very stong bearing on, as you rightly pointed out, how the 2 million voters would decide in the next round. My contention here is rather simple and straight-forward, i.e. IF THE PRESENT GOVERNMENT DO NOT TAKE CARE OF THE NEEDS, ASPIRATIONS (PROVIDE JOBS / LIVELIHOOD) AS WELL AS EDUCATE THE YOUTH AND ALIGN / STREAMLINE THEIR THINKING, POLITICAL “BELIEF” AND CONFIDENCE, THEN THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD NOT BLAME THE YOUTHS FOR WANTING TO GO FOR THE OPPOSITION PARTY (IF THE OPPOSITION PARTY IS WILLING TO TAKE CARE OF THEM). A right-thinking and sensible politician should regard the youths as a great asset to develop. This segment of the society are regarded as “rough diamonds” waiting to be polished. However, many a time politicans tend to either purposely or unpurposely overlook this matter and only made use (or abuse rather) of the youths for their own political convenience. A classic example happens during party and general elections whereby, the youths’ power could be bought by a mere RM50 and empty promises!
Legendary Tun Mustpha
In as far as Sabah’s politics is concerned, these issues are highly relevant. If we analyse the trend, apart from the great Allahyarham Tun Mustapha, none of the past and current top leaders ever enjoyed such a overwhelming grassroot support. The reason? Because apart from Tun Mustapha, none of them ever give a damn about developing the youths. Okay, I agree that the Tun may have his standoff against the youths in things such as “hair cutting”, etc., but at least he gave them scholarships to further their studies and a token share of money to their parents in form of Amanah Saham. This effort had a very long lasting impact on people’s minds. To a greater extent, the very core of today’s voters were developed and formed during his time. Now, can any of our thick headed politicials emulate his feat? While I m not suggesting that our politicans duplicate what Tun Mustapha did, but at least think and implement some new strategies to tackle the people’s current needs. Talking about grassroot support, I personally feel that our politicans in Sabah today are only banking on a so called brand name(s), but in actual fact they dont have a staunch or die-hard grassroot support. In College, when we learned Psychology, there is a great difference between the term “actual” and “perceive”. I suspect that our politicans cant exactly tell the difference. I dread to throw some other issues such as “social re-engineering”, etc. for fear that they might fall asleep!
I apologise if my choice of words, statements and examples in this e-mail are rather harsh or extreme, but I needed to do so in order to better illustrate my points. I shall try to share my humble thoughts with you from time to time. I hope you dont mind.
Wassalam.
JJ
3 Responses
2009 Feb 08
I agree with the some of the comments made by JJ regarding the direction our youths are making in their choice of political alignment. However, JJ must also be aware that some 4 million young people are not even registered as voters. If this figure is not disputed, then our youths deserve the type of leaders and government they get. Obviously, it is quite pointless to gripe about leaders and government if they can’t even do something quite simple like becoming voters.
The other issue I would like to differ with JJ is his adoration of the late Tun Mustapha. Much of what he believes in about the man is probably hearsay. No doubt the late Tun was a very nice gentleman and he had a lot of quite fanatical supporters. (He even turned up at my father’s funeral in 1985). Sadly, most of these supporters were drawn from very backward pools of people notably from areas such as Usukan, Semporna, Kunak, Sipitang, Beaufort, Kudat, Pitas, Kinabatangan and pockets where so-called Muslims lived. The late Tun did not enjoy wide support amongst the non-Muslim Bumiputras and the Chinese. This was reflected in the 1976 general election results when USNO retained all 20 Muslim-dominated seats but lost all the rest to the newly-formed Party Berjaya.
In the 1981general elections, Berjaya won by a landslide, leaving USNO with only 3 seats, Usukan, Semporna and Banggi (Tawau was won by the late Stephan Chan). These 3 seats were inhabited by the most backward, uneducated, and neglected group of people then. However, it must be remembered that the late Tun did not play any part in that general election. He was not even living in Sabah at that period of time.
In 1985, when Datuk Harris Salleh decided to call for a dissolution of the legislative assembly, the late Tun decided to make a comeback. The scene at the old airport in Tg Aru, for those thousands of USNO supporters who were there, must have been completely unbelievable. The Tun’s long, black Mercedes bearing registration number J1, were pushed all the way back to his house.
People were very angry with Datuk Harris over his treatment of Joseph Pairin Kitingan,Tambunan and the issue of Labuan becoming a federal territory. The late Tun saw an opportunity to make a comeback and seats were ripe for the taking from Berjaya.
USNO managed to capture 16 seats, PBS 25, Pasok 1 and Berjaya was left with 6.
After the annulment of the late night swearing-in of Tun Mustapha at the Istana, PBS formed the government. Riots broke out soon after.
The reasons for the riots and subsequent curfews in Kota Kinabalu was simple and straight-forward, PBS and USNO had a joint undertaking to topple Berjaya. When PBS had sufficient seats to form a government, they left USNO out of the equation. This angered the USNO supporters who took to the streets. This started when someone painted 2 crucifixes in red at the state mosque in Sembulan.
A subsequent march from the mosque a few days later was stopped by the police at Karamunsing for several hours. This led to the burning of many of the Karamunsing warehouses.
In the evening of that day, Datuk Hj Yahya Lampong, who was one of the leaders of that march, escaped the police dragnet and reached my beach house in Sipitang. His immediate request upon alighting from his vehicle was to ask for my help to get him out of the state. My immediate retort was whether he had any money on him to pay for his transport out. I asked him to go into the house whilst I looked for a friend in town to tell him about our predicament. When I returned home, I fed him some chicken curry and he told me what had happened earlier that day in Karamunsing. Soon after, another old friend turned up by boat with his son, not having a clue as what was going on. I put Hj Yahya on his boat for his escape to Brunei.
What’s my point in saying all this JJ might ask?
My point is this, whilst JJ spoke of the need to educate the young to be worldly and to be mindful of the country’s needs to move forward towards betterment, the hardcore USNO/Tun Mustapha supporters up to the late 1980s were the exact opposite.
I dare say this because I spent years in community service and I knew which type of people supported USNO and had great admiration for the late Tun. These people were mostly from extremely misinformed or ill-informed backgrounds. They were mostly poor Muslims who looked towards the late Tun for some form of leadership, much like Malays looked to their Sultans because they did not know or dare look to anyone else.
During the riots of 1985, I stayed at the Tun’s house in Tg Aru and had the opportunity to study the demeanors, facial expressions and opinions of those hundreds who camped there. It was an experience that haunted me to this day. What I saw was scary. I said to myself, there was no hope in hell we could move forward with these people. By now their children would have changed perhaps and are supporting UMNO.
What I would like to state here is that the late Tun might have been a good rallying point for the Muslim Bumiputras for a period of time. That worked because like the people I saw at his house, were willing to believe in him and allowed themselves to be deluded into believing he was their leader regrdless of anything else.
To illustrate a case in point, some years ago when USNO had been dead and gone and replaced by UMNO, I had coffee with an old uncle who told me that he would not support Harris simply because, according to him, he sold Labuan. This of course was a common rallying call in 1985. But what saddened me was, what had this to do with him and how had he managed to improve his well-being all these years other than believing a lie perpetrated by USNO leaders? The people of Labuan are not complaining about being a federal territory whilst he had to wait for a pirate taxi to take him to town from the 1960s until he died in 2005. In all that time he made no effort to improve himself and yet he was happy to believe in a lie.
If he go through the records of the Tun’s tenure as chief minister, we will know that his achievements were minimal. He was hardly in the state to govern.
The general elections of 1976 laid bare many of his misdeeds and the people of Sabah decided they have had enough of him as a leader except for the Muslim areas. I shall not bother to list the many issues that worked against him, for enough were written in the past about this. Attempts to recuscitate his fine points will be futile.
For JJ to claim that other chief ministers did not give a damn about developing the youths is empty rhetoric and devoid of knowledge.
I was part of a government that provided free shoes, free uniforms, free milk to school children. This simple, albeit expensive program, reduced immeasurable burden from parents in the rural areas. Malnourishment, believe it or not, was common amongst children in Sabah up till the 1980s. This, and the lack of simple requirements like uniforms and shoes, caused parents to stop sending children to school.
The granting of scholarships and study loans did not end with the departure of Tun Mustapha. It continued until there was no more funds left. Those who borrowed did not pay back their loans. These loan defaulters are living amongst us today. Some are talking smart about politics and babble on about how things should be done. They probably avoid telling their children about these debts for they know that they are curtailing the ambitions of other youths who are not their children to get their education and make themselves better citizens.
2009 Feb 08
Aside from all your other issues in your article, I am most touched by your reference to EDUCATION of our youths. I agree with you wholeheartedly. I have commented on this somewhere else in this Blog. I commended on the effort by the former MP for initiating the Education Foundation for the people of Pensiangan. Only hope he has not given up, now that he is no longer the MP for the area. To me personally and honestly, Education is one of the best ways out of the seemingly endless cases of poverty among our ethnic races in this beloved state of ours. Thanks brother.
2009 Feb 19
I posted the above article to the main page-admin