Written by: Dr. John Brian Anthony 20th May 2010 (Resubmitted by Cikgu Iban)

1. Delicious lunch.

A few days back I had lunch with some very senior people from the Government. The lunch was delicious and the conversation was “luar biasa”, a topic that was spelled out carefully to me to make me understand that as government we must be “sensitive to the feeling” of other races, not only Dayak.

The discussion touched on what would be the measure of success for Dayak? One measurement is for Dayak to breakthrough their current “limitation” and conquers new “frontiers”. That is a lot of meaning embodied in one word “frontier”.

Very well said. Let me now break it down to make proper sense out of the expensive lunch and to share with you all my understanding of “how” our senior Dayak leaders in Government think.

2. BN concept is the best concept for Dayak.

I was told that the BN concept of power sharing is the best concept for Dayak. Without BN it is almost impossible to bring development to the Dayak. Simply put, Dayak DO NOT have money and secondly Dayak do not have the numbers to rule this country.

Today we have Pakatan Rakyat as the Opposition and some even claimed to be the third force or the king maker in Malaysian politics. This Pakatan Rakyat offer multi-racial platform, equality, transparency and even special consideration for the development of Sarawak by increasing oil and gas royalty to 20% and even setting an Oil and Gas company that is run and operated by Sarawak. Read the rest of this entry »

Written by: Dr. John Brian Anthony (Resubmitted by Cikgu Iban)
Thank you Cikgu for submitting the various articles which i  re-publish here.

“It is better for the Bidayuhs to “fight” the Government from within rather than from outside the BN political parties”, said Deputy Tourism Minister Datuk Dr James Dawos Mamit.

The same has been echoed by many other Dayak YBs particularly from PBB. This could well be the view of CM Taib so that the Dayak YBs will not join the chorus of the Opposition to put right what is wrong in the BN government. It is certainly not a new piece of advice and all I can say is this: it is one of the biggest lies of the BN YBs. The fact is you cannot do anything to change the wrong when you are within BN. CM Taib who is the “boss” will definitely threaten you. Similarly, your peers will also threaten you if you ever disagree with the BN policies. Therefore, have you ever heard of a BN YB saying anything different from the official tag line when a Dayak long house is being pulled down by the authorities? Read the rest of this entry »

Written by: Dr. John Brian Anthony, 8th Dec 2011 (resubmitted by Cikgu Iban)

There are TWO schools of thoughts on this. One is to treat DAP as “racial enemy” following the lead of UMNO and the other is that we Dayak should shift our support from BN to DAP. The obvious advantage of such a shift is that the combined Chinese and Dayak would make up the most numbers in Sarawak. In addition, the Dayak and Chinese are a more natural team to go it together and form the next Government in Sarawak.

1.Sarawak is a unique situation.
Many of us hold on to the idea of Sarawak for Sarawakians only. Many more hold on to the perception that whatever is Chinese is bad because of our daily experience in their way of the Chinese dealing with us. The bottom-line really depends on us in that if we know what we are looking for and know what to do we will not get cheated time and again. It is not right to blame others for our weakness but we must step up our effort to adapt and improve our selves so that we can be in equal footing with others. The Malay Muslim in Sarawak should also be with us but following the practice of “majority” rule, they must not play a dominant role in Sarawak. As it is, the Malay Muslim is leading Sarawak, leaving the majority Dayak and Chinese to be led by this minority group. In Penang for example, the Chinese rule Penang. Similarly in Kelantan, Terengganu and many other Malay majority states, the Malay rules the States because they are the majority. The exception of this situation is seen in Sarawak whereby the Malay minority rules the state of Sarawak. Read the rest of this entry »

Written by: Dr. John Brian Anthony

In Sarawak, it is common knowledge that the police always side with the big companies and to a certain extend the gangsters. It is even  common knowledge that a certain BN YB is the “Godfather”of gangsters in Sarawak. The gangsters control the prices of rubber and even eggs for that matter. Just recently we have hundreds of cyber gambling raids after the matter was raised by the Opposition MP. At first the police deny any knowledge of such cyber gambling outlet. Some cyber gambling outlet manage to escape police raid which could be attributed to inside information from within the police force to the gambling den operator.

Why do we need to wait for an Opposition YB to highlight the matter to the press before the police took action? Most of the time, no action is taken against the organizers of these gambling dens etc. Is there any involvement or has the gangsters manage to infiltrated the police and that with the police force are criminal elements who masterminded the many ongoing illegal activities in Sarawak?

Time will tell as we compile more evidence that is collaborative to determine whether it is true or false! Read the rest of this entry »

Written by: Dr John Brian Anthony

It is very interesting to see Tun Mahathir coming back into the political front and made his two cents worth of opinion known to all. More often then not, he repeated his old dog tricks that had me taken in before but not now. One of which is that BN is tested and has experience in governing while Pakatan Rakyat has not!. Time has solved this problem when Pakatan won 5 States with one taken from under their feet (Perak) after the PRU 12 election. PR Government has not only proven to be successful but it has set new standards in governance and a high standard in fiscal management of the States they govern. What the people wanted was transparency and fairness (equal opportunities) and the Pakatan Government has led all the way in performance if we use the Auditor General Report as a guide.

So, we now can be rest assured that Pakatan Rakyat can rule their States better then BN and we can infer that Pakatan Rakyat will be able to rule Malaysia much better then the BN can. Read the rest of this entry »

Written by: Dr. John Brian Anthony

It strikes me that Tun Mahathir is sending messages to the people to fear Pakatan Rakyat because it can easily surrender its independence to foreign country by the mere fact that Anwar Ibrahim invited Australia to monitor the conduct of PRU 13. It seems that BN has a lot of election rigging, manipulation and unfair practices to hide. Afterall, the BERSIH protest was not over nothing. Maybe, BN now realized that there is a strong possibility that it will lose power after the coming election. Tun Mahathir and Tun Abdullah appeared nervous if you read their statement in the news media. Tun Mahathir issue a threat even. Today Malaysian have enough courage  to stand up against the deceit of BN and their money politics.

Today Tun Mahathir said that there will be chaos and demonstration in the streets if Pakatan Rakyat losses the coming election. This will frighten the people  from voting PR. I call such politics “politic indai lagau”. Ngenatuk ke orang aja. The reverse might be true that BN might not hand over power peacefully to PR should PR win the election. When BN become the opposition as we have seen in Penang they would become “cry baby” and a very bad “sour grape” . After PRU 12  they illegally grab back Perak .  Should UMNO loss PRU 13 the UMNO Malay might even go to the street and create a May 13 repeat. So many UMNO elite will loss their source of income, their wealth and high living life style. They will instigate situation to create chaos. It would be testing time for Malaysia. We must be prepared.

Mamak kutty Mahathir is a master of double meaning talk and reverse psychology. We all know him all too well. But the infighting in UMNO between Najib, Muhyuddin and Mahathir is going to bring UMNO down. Read the rest of this entry »

Written by: Dr John Brian Anthony

With due respect to “We Love Muhammad Global Club of Malaysia” asking for public donation of rm$1 million to be given to Palestine is less than an honest NGO effort. It is a political strategy with a message to Muslim to stand united in the coming PRU 13 election. BN strategy and bluff is getting from bad to worst.

What is rm$1 million to Palestine?

The amount is negligible but BN is making this donation drive symbolic of Muslim unity. There is nothing wrong for doing it, just that non-Muslim must be aware of what is going on inside BN election strategist head. The Malaysian government has given many million to help Palestine and the Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC) many more million over. Then they are donation from the develop countries of Europe and US specifically, so what is $1 million for? Read the rest of this entry »

Written by: Dr John Brian Anthony

The Chairman of the Public Service Commission met the representatives of Dayak NGOs and listen to their grouses about the poor participation of Dayak in the civil service. Actually, there are only 2.8% Dayak in the Federal Public Civil Service which is grossly inadequate. I dare say that the Dayak YBs never talk about this problem and maybe the government pick this info from the social media and acted on it.

When the President of Sarawak Dayak Graduate Association called to inform me of this challenge my first reaction was of utter disbelief. The reason is because it is impossible to produce such number with a very short time of 2 months and actually we might never have that type of numbers looking for a job in the civil service. Nevertheless, I reacted by saying that the Dayak has to form a special team made up of the various stakeholders and organize them to allow for the dissemination of information and the collection and tracking of the number of application received. There is a need to go all out using all media available and break up into smaller team to ensure that the potential Dayak employee in the civil service acted on this challenge.

Possible short term solution

I was thinking how many Dayak has been appointed or should be into the current Public Service Commission as its member. If there is none then the Government should appoint at least TWO members from the Dayak community to help oversee this recruitment exercise even for a short term. Read the rest of this entry »

Written by: Dr. John Brian Anthony

After May 13th 1969 incident, the then Prime Minister Tun Razak seize the opportunity to realign Malaysia to enure that the Malay as a race is being put as the priority. This is the case when we miss out on the opportunity of creating a new Malaysia without racial differences but all of us are born Malaysian  holding on to the same national values and united in our struggle to be a strong country economically and stable politically.

New Economics Policies

The New Economics Policy was introduce to correct the balance of the economics power in Malaysia. Alas, after 40 plus years, the NEP create an elite group of bumiputera businessmen while most of the population fell back behind. The NEP is being used by politicians and their political cronies to gain business monopoly and obtain license over the extraction of natural resources. The rural income did not improve as the rural economy was not develop with adequate infra-structure like roads and amenities like clean water and electricity. The political leaders focus was on enriching themselves and their cronies. Read the rest of this entry »

Written by: Dr. John Brian Anthony

The Barisan Nasional concept of sharing power in Malaysia is getting out of date. The guiding principle is “consensus among all” and “fair representation” of all races is deviating from the original objective of creating a united Malaysia. In most cases these “principles” are mere lip service as the dominant party like UMNO call all the shots. In Sabah for example, a rotational Chief Minister position end up with nothing but back to the old system of which ever party with the most seat lead the government. In other cases, the government is forced to create “back door” entry of certain leaders in order to achieve fair representation. Even then fair representation was not achieved because of the strength and demand of UMNO.

Local political party in Sarawak

I often hear that Sarawakian are grateful to Tai Manok for keeping UMNO out of Sarawak. That is a fallacy. UMNO is already in Sarawak through PBB and thus need not enter Sarawak by its own entity. In Sabah, UMNO has no proxy therefor it has to get in using its entity. It is not true that by not allowing UMNO into Sarawak and by sticking to Sarawak local party we can keep the Malayan people away. Large track of our land has been given by Tai Manok to Tabung Haji as an example. On a more familiar note 95% of  our oil and gas natural resources is taken by Federal. So really, what is so great about the status of local party in Sarawak? Read the rest of this entry »