Sabotaging the national policy on Bahasa Melayu
… TO SUPPORT THE EXISTENCE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE PUBLICATIONS AND THOSE WHO CAN’T SPEAK THE NATIONAL LANGUAGE WELL!
By Mansor Puteh
Do we know what was happening with the Malay/English issue that had happened of late?It’s got nothing to do with what everybody was talking about, especially those who are bent on supporting the use of English for the study of science and mathematics.
It’s not that.
The truth of the matter is that the non-Malays, mostly, had managed to sabotage the national policy of the government which had wanted to encourage the use of Malay, the national language for everybody. And they were already encouraging the private sector to use Malay as the medium of communication. Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (DBP) even refused to accept letters in English, and replying to them in Malay.
And the government had tried to train graduates who were proficient in Malay over English, thinking that the private sector would welcome them to offer jobs to them.
But it turned out that those who had excelled in Malay are the Malays and the non-Malay students or graduates were grappling with the language and could speak and write in it.So those people in the English language newspapers and other non-governmental organizations (NGO) and other individuals sprung into action to deny the use of Malay as the national language in the private sector, which is purely to ensure that the non-Malay graduates their standing.
And no wonder, even those in the government who had steadfastly tried to insist the use of Malay as the main medium of communication and education became guilty as such and began to jump about on the beat created by those who did not want to use Malay.
This is the truth of the matter. And as a result, the scores of thousands of Malay university graduates who were said to be not bankable or suitable to work in any international companies were left without jobs, which were taken by the non-Malays who could speak better in English but not so in Malay.
