HAVE WE GONE MAD?

Dear Di,

For this first time, I decided to write to you to inform what is going on in this country.

After 4 days of Shawal (the month we Muslims celebrate our victory after 29 days of fasting from dawn to dusk in the month of Ramadan), we Malaysians, including yours truly, cannot resist from talking about politics when we met family, relatives and friends during Open Houses. For your information, Muslims celebrating Aidil Fitri usually hold open houses where food and drinks are served fre to almost everyone that walked into their houses.

The conversations mostly touched on politics, crime and politics again. Of course the name of Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak surfaced regularly. Most of the time, he blamed for the almost whatever had happened in this country for the last few weeks. Even his cabinet line up came under barrage of criticism.


However, the most talked about issue about Najib is "not talking mood". Malaysians noted that the PM has refrained from making statements concerning many issues that have propped out since the last general election in May and there were demands, especially from the Opposition leaders that he addressed them.

I guess we Malaysians are not use to seeing the Prime Minister maintaining a long silence. In the past, almost all Prime Ministers were quick to make statements, including irrelevant ones just to entertain questions raised by journalists during arranged or ambused-style press conferences.

His long silence and limited public appearance of late, has caused some much rumours to surface.


One of them was that some UMNO veterans were trying to exercise their influence to encourage delegates from the branches and divisions to nominate candidates to challenge the incumbent president. These veterans apparently felt that Najib had to take responsibility for the recent outcome of the general election where he was seen as having failed to improve the number of BN seats in Parliament. Under Najib, stewardship, BN lost 7 seats, reducing its majority from 140 to 133. Thus, some even concluded that Pak Lah was a better Prime Minister than Najib.

I guess some people forgot that under Pak Lah, BN lost more than 50 seats in the 2008 General Election.

Perhaps, we should take a break from talking about politics. Malaysians should pay more attention to the economy and be worried. Many developed countries, especially in Europe are economically sick. The situation there will certainly affect us in the not too distant future. If our exports are affected, workers in this country will lose jobs as factories start to downsize their operating cost.

In the current situation we are in, Malaysians should throw their support behind the Government. Forgot about partisan politics and start to behave like responsible citizens. We need to double our efforts, improve the quality of our work, products and services to compete with shrinking market.

I know it will be a huge sacrifice for some Malaysians to leave politics behind. We are too engrossed in politics that we failed to see that this has affected us economically. We are starting not to trust each other. There are even calls to boycott the other races. Have we gone mad?

We know that there are politicians who depend on our support to survive. But, we are now at a cross road to decide whether we support politics and allow the politicians to continue their role in instigating the politics of hate all the way to the next general election or support the Government to improve the economy and ensure our survival as an economic powerhouse.