Traditional Monarchical Habits and Dependent Social Relationships.

There has been a lot of talk about the 3rd vote. We voted for MPs to go to parliament. We voted for assemblymen to go to State Assemblies. We want to vote for people who manage our local governments or pihak berkuasa tempatan. PBT. That is the 3^rd vote- enlarging the empowering of people and giving the people more choices.

You know najib makes all the empty and substance-less statements and pompous declarations about transformation? You would by now realised these are all just empty slogans just for show. To show that Najib is a thinker that is. The bitter truth, Najib has no time to think at all what more to read.

They are all meaningless because, Najib doesn’t address the two most important obstructions to real transformation; one is the retention of the traditional habits of monarchical behaviour. And two, dependent social relationships. You don’t remove these, you will forever be traditional and village people. You can interpret the last expression any which way you want.

The idea is, you want to transform people. One of the ways is to urbanise and modernise. Modernization comes with urbanization. More importantly, urbanization and consequently modernization require adaptation to new ways of managing our social affairs, cutting the umbilical cords of some tradition and most importantly, adoption of, what my thinking friend Walla referred to as

It's not infrastructure of buildings alone. It's also the human resource and work culture ecosystem and one must have pretty compelling soft factors to attract investors to move their people and funds in and park their brands in order to generate businesses that are basically nano-second touch-screen operations.

So why do we want the 3^rd vote? Because we want to put in place the human resource and work culture ecosystem that can work to create the compelling soft factors to attract talent and then to attract investors to come and develop the places we live in. 

it goes without saying, that we know the present arrangement, where dullards function as local Councillors do nothing to improve our lives. More often than not they make our lives miserable engaging in petty corruption and exercising overbearing control over the lives and wants of others.

I am not pulling any punches here.

What do PBTs do? They issue licenses, they look after infrastructure, collect rubbish,  collect taxes for services rendered- cut grass, trees, maintain drains, clean up drains, build business premises, appoint vendors to these premises.

These can be done by employees. We don’t require appointed Councillors adding another layer for decision making and sapping our resources. If we want to do these mechanical things. 

But if we look upon our local governments as the first line of change agents- thinking of things and developments to transform people and whole societies, we must introduce or reintroduce a competitive ethos. That can be done through electing the people to look after a very important change agent.

Why are Malays so afraid of adaptation? Adapt or we perish. We don’t have people who can talk and articulate our interests at local government levels? We don’t have the intelligence and wherewithal to engage with others?

So, we resist adaptation because we don’t want to abandon our traditional monarchical habits which we are so used to and we want to have the  I lord-you unquestioning serf arrangement and we want to retain the dependent social relations so essential for us to retain undue power.  

In the meantime, once a year, they go on trips to far flung places like Johannesburg, or anywhere, taking money from the taxes they collect. They also go to places like Hanoi so that accompanying misuses can go shopping for clothes and cloth. The purpose, so they say, is to learn how cities elsewhere are managed. You can already guess these Councillors are mainly UMNO and BN leaders at local levels.