I no longer read the blogs of Pakatan Rakyat leaders – they are all an exercise in negativity. Yes it is their job to criticise the BN government but please-lah, while you criticise them, you must also educate the rakyat.

With thanks to FMT

Change your game plan, Pakatan

CT Ali

 | March 17, 2014

There are enough gullible voters out there who will be taken in by the BN spins.

COMMENT

I no longer read the blogs of Pakatan Rakyat leaders – they are all an exercise in negativity. Yes it is their job to criticise the BN government but please-lah, while you criticise them, you must also educate the rakyat.

Educating the rakyat in positive politics, politics that instruct rather than destruct, and politics that embed positive values and passion for their nation and its future.

Do not take your cue from the politics that Umno and Barisan Nasional revel in – the politics of negativity!

We know that the former Sarawak Chief Minister is corrupt. We know that Najib Tun Razak cannot even manage his wife, what more this nation.

We know that cabinet ministers need a re-education in Rukunegara and other 
issues that seem to have escaped their senses the moment they became members of Najib’s cabinet.

These things, the rakyat already know and repeating them ad nauseam serves to deaden the effectiveness of the message. We become numb and impervious to what is being told to us.

What about using your blogs to better our rakyat? Use your blogs to educate the fencesitters as to why they must abandon BN for Pakatan Rakyat.

Use your blogs to teach our young about the values we want to instill in them during their most formative years.

Use your blogs to make the disadvantaged, the old and the sick understand that the policies that Pakatan intends to introduce will be advantageous to them and how Pakatan sees them as the most deserving of all rakyat to receive that assist.

Use your blogs to highlight the progress of what your elected reps have done in the kawasan under their jurisdiction – but do it honesty and graciously, and not treat it as just a public relations exercise.

Use your blog to tell the rakyat that the next general election is not that far away and we must ready ourselves for the fight of our life – to take back our country from BN.

Tell them how they can do it and how to get others on side, all this we can do by educating our rakyat on the need for change. Be the agent for change and be the change that you want Umno to be.

Pakatan received over half of the votes at the last elections. Imagine the goodwill you have within the rakyat. They have already given their votes to Pakatan and Pakatan must hang on to these voters and seek for more to come over to our side.

How do you hang on to these voters that are already with you? In this I can only speak for myself.

If I had voted for Pakatan in the last election, I want to see positivity in their politics. I want to see Pakatan do in the states they control what they say they will do if the get federal government – open government, transparency and absolutely no corruption, nepotism or cronyism.

Yarning a spin

Put in place checks and balances within these state governments to ensure that these things will not happen.

Let the public have access to your decision-making or at the very least explain the mechanisation of your decision makings so that we know that you have the interest of our people when you make those decisions.

And having made them, show us that in their implementations you seek to do, what is best for the rakyat – not for wakil rakyats or for Pakatan Rakyat.

Is this too much to ask of Pakatan to do? Or is it a matter of cakap bukan serupa bikin ala Umno and their Barisan Nasional partners?

These are simple common sense approach that is missing from BN.

Understand that for everything that you do and everything that you say, there is the Internet. When you tell us that Anwar Ibrahim, or Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, is going to contest in Kajang, within hours of that announcement there will be hundreds of bloggers giving their two cents worth of comments and their take on what they think that Anwar is doing.

By the end of that day there will be thousands of bloggers all over the net giving their take of the situation, and you must not forget the Umno cyber troopers.

So please before you say anything or do anything, sit down and brainstorm thoroughly and understand the implications and the repercussions of what you do and say.

It does not matter if you meant well.

It does not matter if what you want to do is for the benefit of Selangor and its people. And it does not matter that Anwar is sacrificing himself for the sake of the rakyat.

Think of the worst and that is what will happen. Anwar wants to push out Khalid Ibrahim. Azmin Ali wants to get his hands on the RM3 billion reserves that Selangor has. Or that Anwar was persecuted once again.

Name it and they will think of it. Kajang will soon have a life of its own that is beyond PKR or Pakatan control.

We know all this will happen, so why not be prepared and think very, very carefully before you act?

Umno knows that when they throw mud at Anwar or Pakatan, some of it will stick and there is nothing you can do about it.

BN controls the media so why don’t PKR and Pakatan be more proactive when it comes to doing something to counter anything that could have negative repercussions on them.

And for your information, anything you do or say can have negative repercussion on your opposition. It is called spin!

Gullible voters

And there are enough gullible voters out there who will be taken in by the spins.

There are voters out there who think that having a Batik fashion show in Monaco is good for the batik industry of Malaysia.

There are voters out there who think that Altantuya murderers have already been punished enough and that Razak Baginda is the innocent victim of a deal that has secured for Malaysia submarines that can only add to the defense capabilities of our Navy.

And I can go on about these sorts of thing but I think you should all get my drift by now.

And every one of these gullible voters are free to give Barisan Nasional or Pakatan Rakyat their votes. And they number in the thousands if not in the hundreds of thousands. Pakatan must work to get them on side.

Do not preach to the converted but do not forget them too!

Pakatan must tighten their Barisan Utama –their frontliners, their first-tier leaders and those who strategise the short and long term plans for the coalition.

They must become one seamless cohesive unit that understand and realise that every move they make must be coordinated and acted upon to bring maximum returns to Pakatan.

Any deviation from this maxim will be taken by your supporter to be a weakness – a weakness that Umno and BN will pounce upon, exploit and then manage to ensure that it causes maximum damage to the credibility of Pakatan.

And when this is done, our supporters will question the ability of Pakatan to be a viable alternative to BN.

We know there are diehard supporters of Pakatan who will be there for Pakatan no matter what but they are not in numbers that can take you to Putrajaya.

We know that there are hundreds and thousand of activists out there who will put their physical self on the line when there is need to confront the police or anyone in pursuance of Pakatan’s ideologies – but not in enough numbers to worry BN.

It is only when these numbers are in the millions that BN will take notice. We have not been able to get those numbers to come on to our side when we need them.

Also remember to put humility at the very top of the things you all must do. When might and financial resources are lacking, your humility will carry you through.

CT Ali is a reformist who believes in Pakatan Rakyat’s ideologies. He is a FMT columnist.