Third world mentality

Former deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim has claimed that the Malaysian government has allocated over half billion ringgit to the University of Cambridge.

Anwar said that both Petronas and Khazanah Nasional have come up with over RM190 million each and the rest of the fund will be collected from some foreign banks that are based in Malaysia.

Can this be due to our hopeless local universities (but Universiti Malaya has said that "we are still the top 200 in the world"), or is it because the government wants to connect and link up certain individuals so that we can show to the world that Malaysia Boleh?

This is very disturbing because we still have students who are not attending school because they are hungry and starve.In Ulu Baram (Miri, Sarawak), the 106 Penan boys and girls at Sekolah Kebangsaan Long Lellang have been attending classes on an empty stomach for almost 2 years now. These students survive on a single meal of porridge and boiled young papayas and jungle shoots.

"Yesterday, I was very hungry and almost fainted. We didn’t get anything for dinner the previous day and yesterday we only had a single meal of porridge and boiled young papaya", said 7-year-old Vicky Ayub. Seluma Jalong, a volunteer in the Chief Minister’s office said, "how can we convince the Penan parents to send their kids to school when they are practically starve over there?".(source of picture: NST, 20 October 2006)

A recent New Straits Times (NST) visit to the school's hostel found a shaky, 2-storey wooden structure which was built by the villagers more than a decade ago. There were no beds, mattresses, pillows or blankets.Our government really should be proud of having this kind of third world mentality when managing the country's pool of wealth and resources. So much for PM Abdullah's "we are ready for the final assault on human capital development".