Dear Editors,
Everyone is now visibly upset with the Presidential walkover but I am more upset with the passive nature of our malay candidates. Apart from Salleh Marican and Farid Khan who did not make the cut, there were high profile business persons who automatically qualified like Bank Of Singapore CEO Bahren Shaari and the CEO of PT Trans Retail Shafie Shamsuddin. Why did they not stand up and be counted for our Malay community and stop this farce of an election walkover?
For PR Trans Retail CEO Shafie Shamsuddin, Singapore’s GIC invested 5.2 trillion rupiah (SGD$387 million) for a 17% stake in PT Trans Retail. If you extrapolate that to the full value of PT Trans Retail, it would be over SGD$2200 million. This would have allowed him to qualify without any problems.
Same for Bank of Singapore CEO Bahren Shaari, BOS managed more than 79 billion dollars worth of assets, surely that qualifies him automatically as well.
So why did these two upstanding individuals from our community not step up to challenge Halimah Yacob who did serve in public service but sadly has not have the experience in managing huge amounts of money like the Singapore reserves.
Are they more concerned with making more money for themselves? Why did they not take the opportunity to give back to our community and to show Singapore that we the Malays have good candidates as well? We don’t need any special treatment to qualify for the 500 million benchmark, we have successful people who can qualify on our own merit.
The PAP planned everything nicely and Halimah got a comfortable smooth sailing ride because our Malay representatives refused to step up to the challenge. This is a shame our community, where has the spirit of serving gone to? With too much money, people forget about their roots?
Abdul Raheem
Source: everyday sg
