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Malaysian diaspora contd – Po Kuan’s blog

Malaysian Diaspora Contd. - Po Kuan's Blog

Po Kuan blogs a heart-rending story in the continuing creation of a Malaysian diaspora which has happened to more than a million Malaysians in the past four decades — whether to uproot and migrate overseas and later to take up foreign citizenship.

Although human migration is a common phenomenon in human history and prehistory, the migration of over a million Malaysians in the past four decades was more because of push rather than pull-factors, with the country losing many of her best talents and human resources stunting and undermining Malaysia’s achievement of her full potential in national development and international competitiveness.

Malaysia on her 50th anniversary would have been a more developed, equitable and more competitive nation if more than a million of the most talented , enterprising and resourceful Malaysians had not been driven away from our shores in the past four decades because of unfair discriminatory nation-building policies and measures by myopic politicians.

After nearly four decades of such self-inflicted injuries, the heart-rending story which Po Kuan blogs should have come to an end with the abandonment of unfair discriminatory policies among Malaysians.

But this is not the case. It would appear that the “Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish” reflex and mentality to the problem of emigration of Malaysians, though not publicly stated as in the seventies and eighties, is still quite prevalent today.

There is not much that can be done about the pull-factors of human migration but a government which refuses to address the problem of the push-factors, which are the result of the failures of just and good governance, cannot claim to be a good government. Continue reading “Malaysian diaspora contd – Po Kuan’s blog”

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Imparting soft skills or promoting direct sales?

A final-year student from the Faculty of Arts and Social Science, University of Malaya complained that a workshop purportedly to impart soft skills was actually a direct-sales commercial programme.

This is the email:

I’m a final year student from Faculty of Arts and Social Science, Unversity of Malaya. I had a disappointment and felt been cheated with what had happened yesterday (17th March 2007) and I would like to tell you here.

Yesterday, all the final year students from the Faculty of Arts and Social Science were told to attend a workshop called ‘Bengkel Pendedahan dan Penilaian Kemahiran Keusahawan’. It is a soft skill program which is set by the government to improve our presentation skill in the future.

At first, from the workshop title, I thought it was an entrepreneur course that gives us some guide line on what entreprise is all about. There were 2 talks in the morning session, and some programmes and activities in the evening. Pertaining to the talk, they invited a company called ‘Aznita Mgt (M) Sdn. Bhd. to talk about financial industry perspective. To me, it was only a DIRECT SALES program. During their talks, they had told us it is pointless and useless to study so hard, no use to be a teacher, doctor or lawyer, as the money earn is much lesser if compare to them. They can live in a big house and drive luxury cars.

In the second part of the speech, actually the person who gave the talk is the husband to the first person who gave speech. They are from the same company. In this session, he told us about his product, Amcash. It is related with the insurance product. He talked about how good the product is. For instant, if we invest in Amcash, we can obtain scholarship every 3 years, the payer will get insurance benefit and so on. We had a very bad impression about those speech. Continue reading “Imparting soft skills or promoting direct sales?”