By Haris Ibrahim,
On 15th June, in Parliament, Najib purported to explain his 1Malaysia.
This is Malaysianinsider’s Hafidz Baharom’s take on that explanation :
“Personally looking at it, I still don’t understand just what exactly the 1 Malaysia concept is. I mean, even Mahathir’s Vision 2020 and Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi’s Islam Hadhari had better explanations.
If there was one thing our beloved Prime Minister has done, it’s to confuse everyone in Malaysia with a policy that isn’t “too rigid” but unoriginal, unexplainable and downright incomprehensible to anyone but himself”.
Hafidz, in his article, alluded to his penchant for referring to Hansard. If you would like to refer to Hansard to get a blow-by-blow account of what Najib said on his 1Malaysia, you can access the same, in PDF, HERE. Go directly to page 8 for that account. Take it from page 1 if you want to read about the antics that followed Nizar’s swearing-in.
Personally, I preferred to try and make sense of Najib’s 1Malaysia, if at all possible, from his dissertation that was uploaded on his blog on 15th June and 18th June.
He starts off in the second paragraph by declaring that the ultimate goal of 1Malaysia is national unity which, he says, has been the vision of the leaders before him.
Tunku, I believe so. Hussein Onn, perhaps.
Razak?
Mahathir?
Pak Lah?
A bit of Mahathir’s ‘distortion’ creeping into 1Malaysia, don’t you think?
1Malaysia, Najib says, differs from the aspirations of earlier leaders only in its approach and implementation.
Let’s see.
In the next paragraph, with regard to his proposed approach, Najib tells us that the approach he proposes is to run in tandem with and to complement government policies thus far.
Government policies thus far?
Read that to mean a continuation of the policies put in place during Mahathir’s 22 years and Pak Lah’s 4.
The immediate objective?
Reinforce our solidarity!
The end objective?
Guarantee stability towards achieving higher growth and development for Malaysia and her people.
Hold on!
Didn’t he say earlier that the ultimate goal of 1Malaysia is national unity?
Now its higher growth and development?
In what remains of the third paragraph of his first post, Najib or whoever wrote this up for him got so confused and inadvertantly let the cat out of the bag.
See what he says :
“.…1Malaysia is a formula conceptualised as a precondition in ensuring the aspirations of the country to secure a developed status by 2020 are met”
It gets better.
“If the idea of “Bangsa Malaysia” which was engendered through Vision 2020 becomes the final destination, then 1Malaysia is the roadmap that guides us towards that destination. This definition is built upon the argument that in order achieve the status of a developed nation in the predetermined time frame, the key requisite is a strong and stable country, which can only be achieved when its people stand united“.
If I understand this man, he would have us believe that his 1Malaysia is the roadmap to the Bangsa Malaysia that Mahathir spoke of and, again, with developed-nation status as the ultimate goal!
Put simply, we must all strive for national unity to achieve developed-nation status by the year 2020 because that is what we all desire!
Are you getting a sense of the jiwa of the man who now proposes to unite us all as a nation of a single people?
Not yet?
Read the rest of his posts.
1Malaysia is not about assimilation but about acceptance, “where one race embraces the uniqueness of other races”.
The bedrock of his 1Malaysia is “justice for all…welfare of all Malaysians will be looked after, leaving noone behind”.
For this, he says, “government policies…that protect the interests of disadvantaged groups will continue to be implemented”.
Really?
Go and tell that to the 30,000 who took to the streets on 25th November, 2007. They’ll be so, so relieved.
In the seventh paragraph of his first post, where he seems to link nation-building with “the Rakyat must be the first to be developed”, I got a little hopeful.
Could it be that this man just might understand what needs to be done to begin the process of undoing the ‘divide-and-rule’ that his predecessors had crafted and to slowly but surely build a nation of a single people?
More importantly, does this man care enough to begin that process?
I read what was left of his first post and all of the second.
A lot of fancy words with no concrete ideas about how “the Rakyat must be the first to be developed” , about how to go about changing hearts and minds so that Malaysians see each other as just Malayisan and not Malay, Chinese, Indian, etc.
In both of his posts, he never touched, even in passing, on what, in my view, is the most important change that we need to see happen if the government of the day is serious about national unity.
Education.
Leslie Lau, in an article in the Malaysianinsider, shared his thoughts on this :
“The idea of national unity cannot be forced on a people. It really depends on one thing. And that is whether people believe in a country. For the most part, that probably happens when there is a sense of belonging, fair play and opportunity. And that comes from our attitudes toward each other. Education is ultimately about providing the opportunity for knowledge. If Malaysians think our education system is failing us, we must examine why and then fix it. I do not know whether the answer is to maintain the system we currently have or to have a single school system. What I do know is that schools are not the place to fix the distrust and suspicion we have of each other as Malaysians. To fix that, we have to change our attitudes”.
I’ll add to that and say that you don’t use the schools to sow the seeds of distrust and suspicion.
You use the schools to buiild the minds and hearts of our young so that they see themselves as one people of this nation.
More specifically, teach our young the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about how all the races contributed to the early development of the Malay states before independence and how those same people worked collectively to achieve independence.
Remember Kelana Jaya MP Loh Seng Kok complaining in Parliament that the syllabus of history textbooks ignored the contribution of non-bumiputeras, that “the fight against the Japanese Occupation during World War II is portrayed as only the effort of the Malays but ignored the role of Chinese and Indian Malaysians”? Malaysiakini has the report HERE, if you don’t remember.
Make the Federal Constitution a compulsory part of the history syllabus.
Teach our young that all are equal under the constitution, and that all disadvantaged Malaysians must be helped without discrimination on grounds of ethnicity or faith.
I do not suggest that this alone will cure the ills that we see in our society inflicted by the divisive policies of the past and present government.
Ignore this, however, and all other measures at forging real national unity will come to nought.
It is not that Najib is clueless.
Indeed, his recent readiness to hold talks with PAS on Malay unity and the possibility of forming a unity government is most telling.
As one commentator said in Malaysianinsider : “…when confronted with the choice of Malaysian unity or Malay unity, you would plump for the latter but attempt to wrap it as a option which would be consistent with your 1Malaysia concept”.
Like Mahathir, Najib’s jiwa is not with the people.
He does not care.
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