Humayun Kabir
Sep 16, 10
3:13pm

MALAYSIA DAY The 1Malaysia concept of Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak must be beefed up to reflect a meritocracy system based on merit and credibility, regardless of colour and creed, to reflect the sincerity of the BN government in celebrating Malaysia Day.
Today, 47 years after the formation of Malaysia on Sept 16, 1963, Malaysia Day has finally been acknowledged by the federal government as a national holiday. Until then, only Sabah and Sarawak celebrated this occasion on a state-level basis.
The DAP and Human Rights Party Malaysia (HRP) today called on Najib to make more radical changes in the employment selection of Malaysians to transform the country’s economy from a semi-industrialised one to a knowledge-based ‘K’ economy.
In making the call, DAP national assistant treasurer Nga Kor Ming also congratulated Bank Negara Governor Zeti Akhtar Aziz on being named by Global Financing as one of the world’s best central bankers.
Nga (right), who is also Perak DAP secretary and Taiping MP, said Zeti’s honour proved that Malaysia too could produce world class talent, but only if the BN government cherished and implemented a system based on merit and credibility, irrespective of colour and creed.
In a media statement, Nga said it was crucial for Malaysia to acknowledge that without the best brains, the country’s vision to transform the economy from semi-industrialised to knowledge-based "K" economy would be in vain.
According to World Bank Statistics, 1.48 million people have left the country since Merdeka 1957, out of whom 900,000 were highly qualified professionals, he claimed.

Importing the lowly-educated instead

"Such brain drain is not merely phenomenal, but is indeed a national crisis.
"To make matters worse, during the same period, we imported more than 2,000,000 lowly-educated foreign labourers into our country."
Meanwhile, HRP pro-tem secretary general P Uthayakumar noted in his statement that during the early period of independence, the country was truly multi-racial, with the first member (minister) of education of the yet-to-be independent Malaya in 1955 being Clough Thuraisangam.
Uthayakumar said the first and second finance ministers of the country were Tan Cheng Lock and Tan Siew Sin.
The very first independent Malaysian naval chief was Rear Admiral K Thanabalasingam, the post-independence Chief Justice of Malaya was CS Gill and the first Governor (now Yang Di Pertua) of Malacca was a Chinese.
Down the line, the governance of the country saw many non-Malays occupying important civil posts, which saw the growth of the multi-racial nation, he said.
However, the present scenario was a pale shadow of the Malaysian Malaysia concept of those days.
Uthayakumar (left) lamented that the world at large could recruit brains and talent without seeing colour to boost the growth of their countries’ economies.
However, the BN government seemed to be shortsighted in the recruitment of such Malaysian talent that was lost to foreign countries. For example, Malaysian-born Penny Wong could become the finance minister of Australia.
He called on the BN government to restart the multiracial concept of governance to take Malaysia to greater heights and make Najib’s 1Malaysia concept a reality, instead of ritual slogan-chanting.