What do DAP and race car drivers have in common?
Wong Saikim
What do political leaders and racing car drivers have in common? They are both in a race of sorts. The politicians want to win at the polls, and the racing drivers want to win at the Grand Prix.
But the DAP and ace driver Lewis Hamilton had one more thing in common– they each suffered crushing embarrassing moments this week.
Hamilton’s embarrassment happened at the race track in Sepang last week. The Formula One racer made a blunder when he pulled in at the McLaren pit stop instead of the Mercedes box. For one brief moment, he had forgotten that McLaren was his previous sponsor and Mercedes was his current. Describing this gaffe, a foreign correspondent said that Hamilton was usually drawn to controversy like a moth to a lampshade.
His old McLaren mechanics were briefly stunned but his fans couldn’t hide a big smile at the blooper. To them, it was no big deal. They were just amused.
DAP’s embarrassment happened a few days ago. DAP admitted to a faux pas of gigantic proportions. The Penang DAP government admitted that there has been a mistake in the entire costs for the mega project involving the undersea tunnel and the three highways. The earlier costs were under reported by RM2.22 billion. Not by RM2.22, not by RM2.22 hundred, not by RM2.22 thousand, not by RM2.22 million, but by a staggering RM2.22 billion!
The error was dismissed as a ‘typo’. But unlike the case of Lewis Hamilton, the rakyat are not so forgiving. They are not amused. How can anyone, leave alone a government, make such a boo-boo? What rocket fuel was used to propel the costs sky-high?
Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng cannot dismiss this mother of all blunders as a mere ‘typo’. A ‘typo’ is a typographical error which only happened in the days when manual typewriters were in use. Typewriters have long given way to computers which always flag mistakes as they occur, and prompt corrections.
The rakyat demands a detailed explanation. After all, it is they who are finally going to foot the bill, one way or another.
Whatever happened to Competency, Accountability and Transparency? Why is DAP silent? Has the CAT got its tongue?
This was not DAP’s first blooper. The party could not even get it right in its elections to its party central executive committee last December. A ‘technical error’ in calculation resulted in an inaccurate result. Candidate number 65, Zairil Abdullah who had the same number of votes received by candidate number 35 Manogaran Marimuthu (305 votes) actually received 803 votes, the party only claimed two weeks after the election.
These are serious mistakes. If a student makes mistakes like these in school, he will be punished by his examiners; if an adult makes mistakes like these at work, he will be punished by his employer; and when politicians make mistakes like these they should be punished by the voters.
