COMMENT | The pussyfooting over recognition of the Unified Examination Certificate (UEC), which was one of the election promises of Pakatan Harapan, and the misrepresentation of the facts of the issue amounts to an utterly egregious conversation. Why do I say this?

The only new factor is the Harapan election promise

It is clear that Harapan won the vast majority of the Chinese votes during GE14 mainly because among other promises, the Harapan manifesto and the Harapan leaders pledged to recognise the UEC, the school leaving certificate of the Malaysian Independent Chinese Secondary Schools that has been maligned by Umno all these years since 1975. Voters were given the impression that such recognition was part of Harapan’s reform in a new and inclusive Malaysia.

The UEC has been held every year since it started in 1975. Today, hundreds of 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.

Education Minister Maszlee Malik has insisted that any decision by the government to formally recognise the Unified Examination Certificate (UEC) will only be made “after a comprehensive and holistic study...