COMMENT | While our doomsday clock in this time of the coronavirus pandemic goes tick-tock, Malaysia has new TikTok leadership in its Education Ministry.

Don't our students in higher education deserve better? More intellectual stuff? Via cyber-education? We went from the black shoes policy to Tik Tok Ideology. We thought it would be a better frontier leadership offered through the appointment of backdoor ministers.

We might be seeing a lowering of the standards of higher education if this trend in mediocre thinking continues. Politicians think they can just secure a well-paid position through political manipulations and sit there watching TikTok, or play with Doraemon dolls or even worse, do nothing much while Putrajaya and the world are dying from the pandemic.

From black shoes to TikTok?

In the previous administration, we were embroiled in the debate over black shoes, jawi script, and how to prevent schools turning into “medan dakwah,” or the battleground for radical Salafi-Wahabi Islamisation. We had that for 18 months until the minister was removed from the position. We thought things might change with a 94-year-old interim minister (re)-taking over.

Things appeared to remain the same. The same debate over race and religious emphasis in education. Then came, of course, the change of government via some strange backdoor strategy which brought back the Umno-PAS ideology.

So much for respecting the voters’ hard work. And now we have the coronavirus eclipsing everything. Now too, we have a TikTok ministry of higher learning surfacing...