Prime Minister's 100 Days

1. To commemorate PM Dato' Seri Najib's 100 days in the office as the 6th Prime Minister, I as a citizen of Malaysia wishes to put down some personal comments and wishes meant for him and his government.

2. I applauded the govenment decision to revert the teaching of Mathematics and Science to Bahasa Malaysia. As the Malay saying goes,"If you got lost go back where you started". However, the announcement was partially committed as the government insisted on English at secondary and tertiary levels. As I said in my earlier post let's have Bahasa Malaysia as the medium of instruction at all levels because Bahasa Balaysia is the language of unity and English is the languagae of knowledge. It must be done from the start from kindergardens to university, for all levels, as the European did.


3. I disagreed with Tun Mahathir who lamented on the fact that after the WW2 the Japanese leant German to procure the technology and hence that's why the Japanese could built cars, the Greeks learnt Arabic to procure and understand philosophy and mathematics, etc (see NST 11/7/09) as I didn't see Japanese speaking German and the Greek speaking Arabic now. Only a small number of selected intelectuals and technicians did that. For Malaysia we want all future citizens to write and speak Bahasa Malaysia and at the same time they do with English and possibly another language, Mandarin, Tamil, Arabic, Japanese etc.

4. The government also intends to reduce the rate of those unnecessary tolls. The tolls had affected the poor so much in the past and the government play deaf on their cries. As the number of vehicles using the toll increase exponentially over time, over the longer period of years the toll concessioners would have the investment paid off.

5. The government also wishes to release the ISA detainees, especially the political and religious detainees whose detentions were a shady and not based on facts . I also wish the government eliminate the "elements of fear" within all strata of the community. It was quite real during the reign of Tun Mahathir.

6. I also applauded the government wish set-up the Economic Council which comprises the economic-thinkers. As the airport taxi driver said,"with the rich natural resources Malaysia has a taxi driver like him should no longer earn this much driving taxi for nearly 12 hours a day. not much time to rest, eran enough to buy his family foods".

7. Please revert the 3-year university curriculum in science to 4 years. Too much damage had been done to the students and lecturers. The 4-year system practiced in the 1970s and until it was changed by the present Prime Minister when he was the Education Minister, did many good things to science graduates. I started teaching in January 1979 until today, and I think I know what I am talking about. So do many other lecturers who are afraid to speak out .....again out of fear.

8. Tell me more about 1Malaysia as I was in the dark when Masyarakat Madani was introduced, when Islam Hadhari was popularised (to me Islam doesn't need an adjective), then now 1Malaysia. I tried to read the thoughts of some politicians and their wives explaining the concept and yet I can't comprehend, what more the less educated Malaysians in the rural areas who don't blog and don't have access to computers and don't read the newspapers.

9. I wish our PM pay more attention to the environmental issues which are affecting all activities to-day. The state of our rivers, species, soils, landscapes etc are in real peril ....let's show-case to the world what a megadiversity Malaysia can offer to them. Please strengthen our human resources and capacity (Dato' Pa tried a few years ago .....) , please strengthen our research institutions, including universities.

10. Please make us proud as Malaysians.

I purposely wrote 10 items, 1 item for 10 days in office. Best of luck Dato' Seri