Clear and Present Danger

Great title eh! I saw the movie but that is not where this title comes from. It comes from the headlines of this morning's paper that I just read. The article goes to say that the warning signs are clear. A water crisis is looming and the two clear indicators are the pollution level of rivers and the demand for clean drinking water. This statement was given by the Director of the Drainage and Irrigation Department(DID). Very simple.


And I thought it had something to do with the atmosphere caused by the Americans. You know, all the rockets and probes that had been sent up that may have caused some sort of disturbance to our atmosphere thereby causing less rain to fall which could be considered as critically dangerous at present. As such - clear and present danger!

Or, it could have been due to that hole in the sky that was the hot topic among environmentalists some years back caused by the fumes from all the cars (mostly from America- again the culprits) and that this hole might somehow have positioned itself just above our country instead of going to the good old US of A . This could have resulted in all the moisture above our country being sucked up into that hole, thus depriving us of rain. This is a clear and present danger.

Instead, I read that the issue was about river pollution and increasing demand of drinking water! What a let down. As it is we don't even have giant monsters from space attacking our cities as in Tokyo and New York. Even the UFOs don't come here. Only silly statements.
We had pollution all the time. As long as the birth rate is greater than the death rate we will experience an increase in the demand for water. This increase can be stopped if a war breaks out and millions of people are killed. At present I think this is unlikely to happen. The Director's proposal to combat this clear and present danger is to increase water tariffs! The revenue from this increase would be transfered to DID who can then use it to rehabilitate rivers. This coming from a senior government servant!

In our country, water is a state matter. This means that every state government has the rights to its water revenue. Thus the Federal government cannot take that revenue earned from water supply. I am not against river rehabililtation. It was that proposal to raise the tariff. The government had just raised the fuel prices by 30 cents. This raise has raised a lot of other things like my regular bowl of noodles and not to mention the economy rice that we eat everyday. I think the Prime Minister is too smart to fall for something stupid like that. What the Director should have done was to ask the Federal government for grants to take care of the rivers. This will benefit the whole nation and the Prime Minister would probably approve it and would transfer some money from Petronas and pass it to the DID to carry out their job of keeping the rivers free from pollution. The procedure for the fund transfer might not necessarily be according to my description but generally that is what should have been done. NOT increasing tariffs!

Scholarships and Fairness

In one of our local news papers was a headline "Najib on the new realities - impossible to offer scholarships to all". This statement is from our Deputy Prime Minister. It is not a new reality. We have known it all along. It is just another political statement by a politician for want of something to say. In every country there will be winners and losers. Similarly, some will get scholarship and some won't, even if they are almost evenly qualified. The edge would have been in some extra-curricular activity. We understand that.

That is not the problem here in Malaysia. What is baffling is when students who get straight A's do not get the scholarship but those with less A's get the scholarship! The government has one policy for the media to publish but have a different one at the implementation stage. Either that or they have too many warlords who control the various departments who don't give a damn for the policies.

A perfect example would be the dressing policy. The government said there is no policy to force students to wear 'tudungs' (cloth to cover the hair on the head) but in so many schools the headmaster/headmistress or even the teachers think otherwise. Some teachers even pinch the students if the hair is not properly covered. They even ask the non-Muslims to cover during certain functions like school competitions in the name of uniformity! How cunning can you get. Another example would be the ruling by the International Islamic University for the female non-Muslim graduands to cover their hair on graduation day. When queried they say it is not religious but the university policy! When the French did not allow one student because she wore a scarf to school they were up in arms about freedom of religion. Hypocrites!

In some departments dealing with the public, the head of department even put up signs telling the public that they won't be allowed in if not properly dressed. The gall of some government servants. Properly dressed by whose standards? Who are they serving? Don't they know they are servants and not masters - hence government servants!

But I digress. The issue is about scholarships. We can only wait and see if this time around there is some fairness in the giving out of government scholarships. The intergrity of the Prime Minister is at stake here. He has made many statements about transparency and being fair to all the various races. We shall wait and see.