COMMENT | Now that Pakatan Harapan has vowed to recognise the Unified Examination Certificate (UEC) in their GE14 manifesto, it would be ludicrous for BN to follow suit by doing the same in their forthcoming manifesto.

They should be reminded that they are the ruling coalition, the same coalition that has run this country for more than sixty years.

No, the BN government would look less silly if they announced the recognition of the UEC as soon as possible, i.e., before their manifesto is launched.

The recognition of the UEC has featured in practically every general election since 1986. The litany of reasons given by the government for not recognising the Unified Examination Certificate (UEC) through the years gets more and more bizarre.

They used to say that the UEC’s curriculum was not up to the mark or they would say that the UEC is not based on the national curriculum and education philosophy, or even a threat to national sovereignty.

In recent years, international schools using English and other foreign languages have proliferated in our country. According to the Economic Transformation Programme, there are more than 81 international schools in operation nationwide.

Now, if this concerted effort to promote foreign schools in Malaysia is not seen to be a threat to national sovereignty, why should the 60 Malaysian independent Chinese secondary schools (MICSS) be seen as a threat to sovereignty?

Malaysian Chinese secondary schools have existed since 1923. For those who are unfamiliar with our nation’s history, Chinese secondary schools have existed in our country since Chung Ling School of Penang started its secondary-level classes.

At independence in 1957, there were some 86 Chinese secondary schools in Malaya.

It was only after the Education Act 1961 that many of these schools were forced to become English-medium (yes, not Malay-medium) at the time. Only 14 Chinese secondary schools remained as “independent” schools.

It was after the “Independent Schools’ Revival Movement” in the 1970s that the number of MICSS climbed to 60 schools.

In 1975, when the MICSS decided to hold its first Unified Examination, the Chinese education leaders were summoned to Parliament by then Education Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad and were told in no uncertain terms to cancel the examination “or else…”

The Chinese education leaders carried on regardless of the consequences and the UEC has been held every year since. To date, there has never been a leak in any UEC examination and the curriculum and marking of exam scripts are carried out every year with professional precision.

Today, more than 400 foreign tertiary institutions around the world recognise the UEC and our MICSS students are found in countries all over the globe, including France, Germany and Russia.

Ever since the eighties, the National University of Singapore has been poaching hundreds of top UEC students not only for their academic excellence, but also for their trilingual capabilities in an effort to balance the cultural mix of their Anglophile Singaporeans.

Look East for UEC recognition

The late Sarawak Chief Minister Adenan Satem had said that the ministry of education is unwise not to recognise the UEC of the sixty MICSS, a certificate that has been recognised by the top universities in the world since it has led to a brain drain of our talented human resources.

Compared to hi-tech brainstorming and money-spinning Putrajaya, Adenan our East Malaysian brother, demonstrated to West Malaysians what a savvy and enlightened politician he was. Our West Malaysian dinosaurs certainly have a lot to learn from our East Malaysian brethren.

How do foreign students get admitted into Malaysian institutions? We are all aware of the fact that our local public and private higher learning educational institutions enrol students from all over the world.

A simple question to the education ministry will show that the reason for not recognising the UEC is completely untenable, namely:

How does a student from Kazakhstan or Bosnia or China gain admission into Malaysian tertiary education institutions when their respective education systems do not follow our national system?

And which aspect of the national education system is the UEC syllabus alleged to not follow? It cannot be in maths and science; nor can it be geography since the Malaysian education system has almost obliterated geography from its syllabus.

Can it be in history? Is the history syllabus of the UEC not “Malaysian” enough? If that is the case, how can any foreign student from any part of the globe qualify to enrol in a Malaysian tertiary institution, since their syllabus cannot be as “Malaysian” as that of the UEC?

Academic accreditation of education institutions and certificates is what the Malaysian Qualifications Authority (MQA) has been set up to do in the first place. One assumes that the government recognises all foreign educational certificates based on their accreditation by the MQA.

How else do foreign students gain admission into our institutions of higher learning? Thus, a student from China can enter a Malaysian tertiary institution based on the PRC’s secondary school leaving certificate. One presumes that our MQA, which is amply staffed, would have done an accreditation of the PRC’s relevant certificate.

Suspending a decision for 40 years

Thus, if the MQA is a professional accreditation institution without political constrictions, it would spell out in no uncertain terms what its audit of the UEC has concluded.

It does not matter if the requirements of the MQA are far more stringent than the NUS' – it just has to spell out in no uncertain terms what the results of that audit are. The government cannot simply suspend a purely professional decision for more than forty years!

It should be pointed out at the outset that, in sharp contrast to foreign students, BM and English are compulsory language papers in the UEC and many MICSS schools also run the SPM at the fifth secondary year (the MICSS is a six-year secondary school system).

This easily demolishes the myth that MICSS students only study in the Chinese medium.

To be fair to our civil service and local tertiary institutions, if they require an SPM credit in BM for UEC holders, that is reasonable. Nevertheless, the academic accreditation of the UEC by MQA is a totally separate matter altogether.

Malaysians should also know that there are hundreds of non-Chinese students in the MICSS and almost 100,000 non-Chinese students in Chinese-medium primary schools of Malaysia.

This is in sharp contrast to UiTM which does not admit any “non-bumiputera” into this public institution even though “non-bumiputera” taxpayers have also paid for this institution.

Does UiTM violate national sovereignty? This bumiputera-only policy definitely violates the International Convention for the Eradication of Racial Discrimination (Icerd).

The truth is that through the years the UEC has become a political issue since Umno refuses to recognise the MICSS system because of their monolingual “Malay Agenda,” a policy that is holding back creative development of our human resources.

Thus, all these years the Chinese and Tamil communities have been paying double taxation when, apart from paying income tax, they also financially support this mother tongue education system.

Recognising the UEC will allow MICSS graduates to be admitted into our public tertiary institutions as well as the civil and armed services, which is the stated intention of the government recently.

This will help to promote greater integration among Malaysians and also alleviate the financial plight of those MICSS graduates who cannot afford tertiary education in the private colleges or abroad.

Well, if the BN government persists in their stubborn adherence to an outdated Umno prejudice and still refuses to recognise the UEC before GE14, then Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak might as well re-use this post-GE13 line asking “Apa lagi Cina mau?”

KUA KIA SOONG is Suaram advisor.

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