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KUCHING: The youth leader of the Sarawak United Peoples Party has described Vice Minister Wan Ahmad Fayhsal Wan Ahmad Kamal as outdated for calling for the abolition of vernacular schools.
On Wednesday, Wan Ahmad Fayhsal said that vernacular schools should be closed because the schools had failed to produce students with a “strong national identity.”
SUPP youth chief Michael Tiang said that Wan Ahmad Fayhsal’s statement was racist, that it belonged to the last century.
“His statement has demonstrated his ignorance of globalization and the development of a digital world that encompasses all cultures, races, religions and languages for the advancement of society,” Tiang said.
“His mindset will destroy the virtue and diversity of our multiracial, multicultural and multilingual Malaysian community,” he told FMT.
Tiang said that while the official languages in Sarawak were English and Malaysian Bahasa, the state government had assisted independent and vernacular Chinese schools through annual grants.
He noted that the peninsula’s politicians have often politicized education issues to seek political mileage.
“Worse still, they have even influenced their ‘Sarawak agents’ to spread the same unwarranted political sentiment in Sarawak,” he said, urging people to reject such political games and rhetoric in the state.
Sarawak Federation of Chinese Associations President Richard Wee also regretted Wan Ahmad Fayhsal’s call to abolish vernacular schools. He said it was as if he was trying to “eradicate” the roots of other races in the country.
He said that Wan Ahmad Fayhsal was being inconsiderate of people of other races in Malaysia. “In Sarawak, we never have any problems related to such an issue,” he said, adding that education and health care should always be above politics.
