PM announces Public Holiday – for what?

Updated: The Malaysian National Football Team lost the World Cup Qualifier matches against Singapore on 28 July with a 6-4 aggregate after losing 5-3 on 23 July in their first round clash. So much for the AFF Champions.
PM Najib surprised the entire Malaysia when he declared Friday 31st December 2010 a public holiday.

The reason – the Malaysian football team won the Suzuki AFF Cup 2010.  Yes, kudos to our boys who finally found a way to win a tournament.

Did you know that AFF stands for Asean Football Federation? Yes, it’s not Asian and we won a small cup against many minnows of the footballing world. This is not putting down Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore who ranks respectable but so what that Malaysia beat our friendly neighbors in this AFF Cup?  It’s like winning gold at the SEA Games.  Will Najib announce another public holiday if we won gold in football at the SEA Games?

I know for a fact that Malaysia will win many gold medals in the SEA Games.  In fact, we won many gold medals in the recently concluded Asian Games. That placed us at Asia class level but we didn’t get any public holiday announcement.

Winning at the Asean level hardly justifies a public holiday.  Even winning at the Asian level should not.  These are nevertheless major milestones towards being the best in the world.  Winning the world cup at football, yes, we must announce a public holiday!

But we only won the Asean Football Federation cup for goodness sake!

What does this say for Nicol David being World Champion for the 5th time on 30 September 2010.  This is what greatness means to Malaysia when The Star reported (read here):

Today, she is widely considered as one of the greatest squash players of all time and she can achieve squash immortality in 2011 by becoming the first woman to capture six world titles since the inaugural tournament in 1976. [emphasis mine]

Do you see this said about our Malaysian football team?  

TBH, Strange Verdict and RCI

The recent “open verdict” returned by the Coroner of which Dr Rafick from Rights2Write blog has so aptly written his piece of analysis and I highly recommend as a very insightful reading (read here).  This is by far the best analysis available anywhere.

The Coroner clearly is convinced that it is not a suicide.  Then says it is also not a homicide.  Then how did Teoh Beng Hock die?  That’s a “funnycide”.

It’s like “Yes the family is right that TBH didn’t commit suicide.”

But it’s also “Yes MACC is not at fault.”

Which brings us to what really did the Coroner say? It’s “your guess is as good as mine”.

So why did we spend 18 months going round the Malaysian bush to come full circle to where we first started? All the time and money and effort to tell that we really don’t know?

Or is it really we all know how TBH died but none of us can talk about it?