COMMENT | So folks, did you enjoy the relaxing Chinese New Year weekend slowly inching for hours on highways, to and from a reunion with family?

Over the past week and over the next, thousands of chopsticks lancing into slices of salmon and strips of colourful this-and-that, tossing them into the air to symbolise a year of further bounty and plenty.

It was an inauspicious start with the fuss over the white ang pows of Petronas and the rooster barking money.

Don’t sensationalise the issues, we were advised. Small matter. Just an honest mistake. (Better than a dishonest mistake, I suppose.)

Let’s say storm in a teacup. White ang pow? Okay, Petronas knows better now.

The rooster barking? I will take it as another illustration of the decline of the country’s education that someone can go through a dozen years or so of school, a few of college or university, and not be able to tell a fowl from a dog.

That’s what you get when you dumb down education. Dumb clucks.

But the Valium platitudes during this period (with the obvious eye towards the looming elections) about Chinese contributions to building the nation, the continuing sharing of the growing economic pie - sorry, don’t work anymore.

And it’s not about the Chinese. It’s about Malays, Indians, and the many ethnic blood-streams that vein our land. Everyone has contributed.

Two elections ago, a member of the cabinet (now ex), said Prime Minister Najib Razak would like to know how to regain 20% of the Chinese vote.

I mailed him four pages.

I used, in essence, a business analogy: Malaysia as a company.

In primary school in the late 50s, my textbook told me we were tops in rubber and tin. When those markets were losing bounce and petering out, we have had oil palm, electronics, petroleum, medical gloves, etc.

Then there is the neighbour whose dollar compared to our ringgit is a favourite moan of critics on social media - Singapore.

Not much land to speak of, no natural resources, not enough births.

Heck, in one of my stand-up routines I refer to it as the drop of sperm at the end of our penile peninsula (I always knew who were Singaporeans in the audience - the silent seats emanating hate because I had provoked dozens of Malaysians into noisily cracking up.)

(Disclosure: My relationship with Singapore. In my second year of university, a play I directed was banned from performance at the University of Singapore. We were given 24 hours to leave the island. In the late 80s, my first script was performed at the Singapore Arts Festival. Brought the house down, literally, on opening night – the chair of a man in the front row broke, and he carried on laughing while on the floor. This was the auditorium of the Development Bank of Singapore. Things don’t break in Singapore. Not allowed by Mr Lee. To our luck, he was seated next to the reviewer from The Straits Times.)

If I have invested half a century of my life and energy in this ‘company’, what dividends have I received? Don’t tell me about better this and better that, because my answer is: it can be much better in so many ways. SINGAPORE!

Living high on credit

After decades of so-called progress and development, there are still many parts of this country that lack economic life and physical facilities, except for a new mosque, where people cross rivers via flimsy bridges, children go to school in sampans, vehicles rumble and tumble on rutted dirt-roads that are dust-shrouds in heat and sucking swamps in rain.

I am amused by the PM attributing the sprouting of tolled highways all over the landscape to Dr Mahathir Mohamad.

In sentiment I agree with him. Reduce the blight. Now, to get from one part of town to another - I use the term “town” loosely because my town is now one giant urban spread, KL/Kajang/PJ/ Shah Alam/Klang – it costs a bomb.

Not to mention you are often paying for the privilege of inching along a crawlway, while chipmunk-sounding radio deejays cheerfully tell you to expect at least two hours before you get home.

The PM says he will scrap more if the finances allow. Thanks but no thanks. We are asked to be prudent in our spending, but the government has been living high on credit.

We are spared a few ringgit, the highway concessionaires get millions in compensation, and are then probably paid to maintain the highway. Ho-hum. Just like BR1M - right hand handing out a few hundred, left hand taking…

Back to the nation/company and the past decades of Barisan stewardship - there are many who know about the left hand. The government can piously preach that people should not pay the left hand, but if the system only hands out contract by hook and by crook...

I told my friend of universities where students were absent from class and exam, and passed. Can’t fail. Then the government will have wasted the scholarship, was the answer a professor friend got by way of explanation for the changing of a fail to pass for a student of his.

A friend, who invited me to teach in his faculty, was removed and transferred to a campus in Kelantan because he refused to countenance passing a student who was absent from the exams, don’t care if his father knew the deputy VC.

That’s helping Malays? I must be bodoh. I don’t get it.

During this period the drumming and clashing of cymbals of lion-dance troupes cannot drown out the daily noisy narrative that Chinese threaten Malay rights… when all the Chinese want is to be treated right.

I am so looking forward to the next New Year when swine fever hits the country.

THOR KAH HOONG is a veteran journalist.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.