A degree course for politician wannabes – Lesson 4

This lesson is about the mindset change. When one aspires to be a national leader, one has to have the confidence to lead. Put the boy scouts and girl guides days behind you. You are now an adult, a politician, a leader of the people, someone the people will look up to, will come to you with their problems, expecting you to solve their problems, to speak up for them in Parliament.

A national leader is a person with leadership qualities, of course there are many fakes and pretenders, with ideas and visions, confidence to state his case, for the people. And there are plenty of opportunities to do so in public and in Parliament. Do not go to Parliament just to ask questions like a student trying to impress the teacher or a way to score some points. Do not ask questions and then eat or swallow whatever dumb answers, and no answers, from the ministers. Insist on a good reply to your questions.

Speak up in Parliament for the people. I can’t stress enough of this point. You may belong to a political party, but your most important duty is to the people that elected you to Parliament. There will be times when there are conflicts of interest between the party and the people. Be very clear that it is the people that you must answer to. The party cannot bring you to Parliament except to offer you support in your election campaign. It is the people that mark a tick or cross on the ballot to send you to Parliament. Do not betray the people who send you to Parliament.

And before I forgot, when you speak up in Parliament, you are speaking for the people. You do not have to ask a minister whether you can speak or what you can speak in Parliament. You do not ask a minister to approve your paper. You do not act like a student, submitting your paper to the teacher and expecting a good grade if the teacher agrees with what you are going to say in Parliament.

You speak your mind, whether the ministers or other MPs agree or disagree with your views when your views are for the good of the people or what the people wanted you to say in Parliament. You are a national leader the moment you are elected. Behave like one, no more boys and girls seeking approval and a pat on the back from other politicians or ministers.

Grow up.

Training – foolishly speaking

Everyone is superficially speaking or foolishly speaking about training as the panacea for all the ills of unemployment. Training, training and acquiring new skills, skillfuture training, or whatever training, are the solutions to the woes of PME unemployment. Really? There is always something new to train for and to learn from. So telling someone to go for training cannot be wrong. Asking an old dog to learn new tricks also cannot be wrong.

There are things like frivolous training, unnecessary training, wasteful training, mismatch training, training for the sake of training and training all for nothing. Whenever a PME loses his job, the answer, send him for training. Training for what, to do what? Does anyone want to know why the PME lost his job? Obsolescence or something else?

Why send a PME who was working effectively as a logistic manager, a marketing manager or whatever manager for more training, in unrelated field, in redundant trades, to downgrade, to be a nurse, a waiter, or a cook or a cleaner? Is the path of being replaced and terminated be one of downgrading or the end of everything?

What was the reason for him or her to lose the job? Could not perform or simply being replaced by a younger person, a cheaper person, a relative or a cousin of the one in power? Who is ultimately responsible for the demeaning and destruction of our talented PME workforce? Who allows this irresponsible trend to continue unabated, taking no action and allowing it to become a permanent feature in our employment scene? Who allows the PMEs to lose their means of earning a decent living and to live with some dignity? Someone must answer for this. It did not happen without the concurrence and approval of someone.

Were the skills of the replaced PMEs still relevant? Could a little upgrading training be sufficient to remain in the job? Or actually no training was needed. He was just being replaced though he could still do the job. Why couldn’t he remain in the same profession with the skills and experience acquired over tens of years? Is the profession no longer needed in the economy? To retrain an experienced professional in another low grade trade is a waste of his talent/experience unless that profession is no longer needed?

How many professions are no longer needed in the economy? Why simply ask a PME to be trained to do something else when his job was simply taken over by a younger person who might not even be able to do better than the incumbent? And worst, a foreigner that came from nowhere to take his jobs at the expense of our very own citizens. Is the Govt very happy with this situation, abandoning its own local talents to bring in people from God knows where that the Govt has not an ounce of responsibility to provide them with a job? Why is the Govt providing 500,000 good jobs to foreigner and allowing our PMEs to become taxi drivers or be redundant and waste away, and breaking up their families or affective the lives of his families?

What is this nonsense about training for new skills when the old skills are still relevant and needed in the industry? Why retrain a professional to a lowly paid manual job when he can still be employed in the same job if the leg open wide wide policy is not foolishly applied to bring in all the animals from all over the world to replace our still able and willing to work PMEs?

What is all this silly talk about training and acquiring new skills? Would one ask a doctor or engineer or a lawyer or a teacher to be retrained as a cleaner or a waiter because a cheaper doctor, engineer, lawyer or teacher can replace him?

What is happening? Every PME cannot find a job in his previous profession and has to become taxi driver or security guard? This is mismanagement of talent at the worst. Totally irresponsible and unforgiveable.

Tony Pua – How to take down a SWF?

Najib is suing Tony Pua, a DAP MP from Petaling Jaya Utara and Chan Chee Kong, the owner of MediaRakyat website for defamation, for slandering him in the 1MDB controversy.  What the outcome of this legal suit is another exciting court drama in Malaysia and may drag on and gain infamy like the Anwar case.

What is important is the immediate impact of what Tony Pua and his peers had done, to bring down the 1MDB ‘sovereign’ fund. The PM Najib has ordered an investigation into the operations of 1MDB and the winding down of its activities plus the sale of its assets. The 1MDB has ‘become a hot potato for the Malaysian government. It was just too much to handle’ according to a report in the Star paper. With the fire sale, what would be left of the 1MDB would be just a skeleton with everything stripped off. Several hundred million ringgits of assets and investments just went pooped and it was all over. Not sure about the reported RM42b debt.

Such big funds are usually managed by a team of professional managers, the lucky people that got to gamble with OPMs with little responsibility and at most losing their jobs. They gamble with other people’s money, not their money, and imagine the kind of opportunities these lucky people have to line their pockets with the payments from all parties, the buyers/sellers of assets and investments, and their employers paying them good salaries plus big bonuses when the gamble was right?

And the good thing is that many of them would not be sacked even if they lost big money as long as no fraud was discovered. They became valuable assets for the expensive training fees paid for their mistakes and wrong bets. They become indispensable for the experience of losing big money.

In the 1MDB case, it was just bad luck that there were Tony Pua and the social media to expose the doubtful and questionable investments made. If all this was hidden, undisclosed, no one would be wiser. The 1MDB could even churn out financial reports after reports to show how profitable were their investments. Who is there to check on the real stuff, who is there to check and confirm that it was really making big losses and all the reports were merely cover ups?

The truth would be revealed in the investigation ordered by Najib. I bet he would assign an independent committee and not cronies to do the investigation. I bet the opposition leaders would demand to be a party to the investigation or to insist on an independent committee, not appointees of the govt. If not, then it would be no different than a kangaroo court with kangaroos doing the investigation.

There is really very big risk in the management of a sovereign fund when the money is OPM and the professional managers are employees who are also human beans and at times would behave like human beans when the temptations are sexy enough. The need for transparency cannot be overstated. Without transparency, no one really knows what is going on.

Malaysia is lucky in this sense, that Najib also believes in transparency and there is real opposition in Parliament to demand transparency. Otherwise, 1MDB would still be happily playing with OPM until the cow comes home and more and more OPM would be injected into the fund for the fun of the management and their patrons.

Tony Pua and his peers could claim one down and more to go.

CPF is an idiot proof retirement scheme

I am inspired, truly inspired, by what the leaders in the PAP Women’s Wing said about putting more money into the CPF for the wives. On first impression it sounded silly, and I thought so too, until I put on my thinking cap and realised how brilliant it is. I cannot blame those people who are so angry with all the things that are happening to the CPF Scheme and their money that is being transformed into not their money in many ways. It is a good lesson to learn. Once you put your money into someone else pocket, you might as well forget it.

Let me explain why the suggestion to put more money into the wives CPF accounts and why I called the CPF Scheme an idiot proof scheme make sense. I am sure all of you understand the meaning of idiot proof. It means it is safe even in the hands of an idiot. So, if one is an idiot, put your money in the CPF is absolutely safe. For there is this very caring and clever govt always there to look after your money and make sure it will be there for the rest of your life and with a lot to spare even after you passed away. In other words, your money cannot finish even after you are finished.

Other than the idiots, people that are prone to gamble away their money, people that are irresponsible with their money, stupid people that could easily be conned of their money, or anyone that does not know how to manage his money, the idiot proof CPF Scheme is the safest. Put your money there and it is guaranteed that the money would always be there, paying good interest rates some more.

And don’t forget about putting more money into the wives accounts too as recommended by the PAP Women’s Wing. The money would also be safe there in the wives’ accounts. But before doing that, remember to ask a few questions or the wives will kill you. Check if your wife is an idiot. Check if your wife is a gambler. Check if your wife is irresponsible or careless with money. Check if you can trust your wife if you give her good money in cash. If all the answers are yes and the last answer is no, then put whatever money you want to give to your wife into the CPF. Then you can feel very safe with the money and your wife not squandering it away.

Now you understand why this idiot proof CPF Scheme is an ideal scheme? Over to you wives.

Japan, who is the real devil?

A recent AFP report had Prince Naruhito chastising Shinzo Abe for trying to whitewash Japan’s crimes against humanity in the Second World War. Today, former PM Maruyama warned Abe for trying to undo all the works of previous PM and discredit them with his revisionist policies and turn them into liars.
 
‘Japan's crown prince has warned of the need to remember World War II "correctly", in a rare foray into an ideological debate as nationalist politicians seek to downplay the country's historic crimes.
 
In an unusual intervention in the discussion, Naruhito's mild-mannered broadside was being interpreted in some circles as a rebuke to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, a key figure in the right-wing drive to minimise the institutionalised system of wartime sex slavery. They even insulted the Koreans by saying the Korean women were willing to serve the Japanese armies as prostitutes, hundreds of thousands of them.
 
"Today when memories of war are set to fade, I reckon it is important to look back our past with modesty and pass down correctly the miserable experience and the historic path Japan took from the generation who know the war to the generation who don't,"
 
During the war crime trial against Japan after WW2, the Emperor Hirohito, as the Sun God, was shielded from all the blame for Japanese aggression and atrocities against the people and countries they invaded. But everyone was quite sure that the Emperor was the one that gave the order, and the guilty one. The Japanese Imperial Army and the Japanese soldiers were merely soldiers obeying the Emperor’s orders. If any one was to be blamed it must be the Emperor. But due to some horse tradings, the Japanese Emperor was spared the embarrassment and punishment. Not guilty but guilty.
 
Today, we are seeing the Prince, a member of the Imperial Household, feeling remorseful at what Abe was trying to do to rewrite history, to change historical facts and to remilitarise Japan into another military power like its infamous past. And the Imperial Household is the one that is distancing itself from the civilian power that wanted otherwise. Is this the same as during WW2 when the Emperor was not for war but dragged into a war by those holding the real power, PM HidekiTojo and his rightist cabinet and those in the Imperial Army? If what we are seeing is the truth and should Japan ended up in a Third World War, the people to be blamed must be Abe and his right wing govt and not the Imperial Household.
 
What actually happened that led Japan to its aggression against its neighbours? Was the Imperial Household wrongly blamed for the war and the criminals were really the non royalties and rightly executed for war crimes? Is Prince Naruhito trying to say something to redress the wrongs done to his grandfather as the one that issued the order for war when it was the civilians that dragged Japan into WW2 like what Abe is doing today, dragging Japan into a WW3?