Dong Jiao Zhong is acting foolishly, much like the zealots in Umno.

Both clamour for vernacular school education that refuses to accept the reality of global competition as well as the diversity of cultures in Malaysian history.

Umno will tell the Malays that the Chinese in Dong Jiao Zhong are out to destroy Malay language education, neatly side-stepping the issue of how English language education suffered a fatal decline under Umno's rule, thereby consigning Malaysian educational standards to the gutter.

In an unexpected twist, by behaving like Umno chauvinists and supremacists, Dong Jiao Zhong has given Umno the biggest campaign boost to the Kuala Terengganu by-election that Umno could ever hope for.

Speaking as a pragmatist, and the Chinese are famous for being pragmatic, I should say that most Chinese want to preserve Chinese school education simply because academic standards in the national school system is beyond fertiliser status.

If national schools taught most of its subjects in English, then Chinese and Malay vernacular schools would become equally irrelevant because most parents - Malays, Chinese, Indians, Kadazan, Ibans - would send their kids to an English medium school.

Umno cannot give parents what they want for their kids - English language schools -because they have spent decades convincing Malay voters that anyone who wants English language schools is out to destroy Malay culture.

Umno leaders make sure their kids learn and speak English in proper English language schools, most often overseas, their exorbitant fees paid via lucrative uncompetitive no-tender cartels, monopolies and unfair business licenses. All this whilst depriving their constituency - your children - an education system that can compete with the world.

In the meantime, whilst Chinese school educationists and Malay language nationalists get upset with each other, thus ensuring voting along ethnic lines - Malays voting for Umno - Umno leaders, cronies and family members continue to rake in billions.

Race, language, religion, and culture in a third world banana republic - the divisiveness thereof - is merely a tool of the political elites in a multiracial society to keep power and enrich themselves beyond your wildest dreams.

Once systematic corruption has set in, there can be no reforms because you cannot expect our political leaders and their family members - millionaires and billionaires one and all to make an honest living - it would be too big, too painful a pay cut.

Any voter who fails to see the bigger picture is a pathetic manipulated fool.

Unless you are prepared to vote in people who are incorruptible and colour blind, then you will get moral degenerates who are experts at shouting racial slogans and playing up divisive issues for the sole purpose of stealing millions and billions of state resources.

No leader has had the guts to have an English school education system since Tunku Abdul Rahman passed away, and we all know how shabbily he was treated by the Umno leadership.

I would like to point out the road ahead for Malaysia by mentioning Zimbabwe.

Robert Mugabe has not faced any pressure thus far from neighbouring African countries to step down despite the catastrophic economic decline, poverty, starvation, disease epidemics, corruption, political murders and tortured repression that have destroyed Zimbabwe - once the bread-basket of Africa - because he has been shouting Ketuanan Africa for decades to justify and prop up his venal criminal despotic kleptocratic rule.

Mugabe has reduced his people to widespread poverty, starvation and death.

Nevertheless, no black African leader has dared to criticise Mugabe for fear of being seen as an anti-black-African, and thereby lose voters in their own country as a result.

Ketuanan politics is not unique to Malaysia - it has caused untold misery globally - you just have to study third world basket cases around the globe. Perhaps that should be included as a subject in our national school syllabus.

Anyway, I am disappointed that Dong Jiao Zhong has been idiotic enough to give Umno the opportunity to look like protectors of bangsa and agama once more in front of its ethnic voting constituency.

Sophisticated voters will know that if Umno cannot make political capital on the education issue, it will find something else to make their voters feel threatened about - perhaps accuse Chinese women MPs of being a threat to the religion, accuse yoga practitioners of leading believers astray. The opportunities are limited only by Umno's creativity.

In a democracy, you get the government you deserve, and if you fail to grasp that race and religion are simply ways of securing votes in a multicultural society, and thereby allow kleptomaniac leaders to steal billions of your money from public coffers, and if you continue to reward racists by voting for them, then it will be but a short skip and a jump on the road to failed country status.

In the near future, I foresee that there will be no need to invite Mugabe to our Perdana Peace Forums because Umno will bring the humanitarian disaster and third world basket case that is Zimbabwe straight to you.