KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 11 — The vernacular education quarrel pitting MCA against a junior Umno leader should be considered settled with Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s allocation of RM50 million for Chinese schools, the Barisan Nasional (BN) Youth chief Khairy Jamaluddin said today.
Khairy, who is also Umno Youth chief, said Najib had the “last word” on the controversy which recently erupted when Petaling Jaya Utara Umno’s deputy division chief Mohamad Azli Mohamed Saad proposed scrapping Chinese vernacular schools.
“The last word comes from the prime minister, not from MCA Youth, not from Umno, but from the prime minister,” he told delegates at the MCA Youth’s 50th annual general meeting here.
Khairy pointed to the RM50 million carved out in the Budget 2015’s tabling yesterday for Chinese schools as the “end of the debate”.
“That’s the end of the debate. That means our prime minister approves of multi-stream schools in Malaysia,” he added.
Later, when it was pointed out that the government has been providing financial aid to vernacular schools every year, Khairy replied: “Annual allocation means that vernacular schools are here to stay. I think that answers it.”
He said he did not know if the issue would be raised by delegates in Umno’s AGM, but said the most important thing would be the leadership’s decision as reflected by Najib’s announcement.
In the Budget 2015 yesterday, Putrajaya said it would channel RM450 million to national schools, while other types of categories including Chinese and Tamil primary schools would get RM50 million each, while RM25 million would be given to national-type Chinese secondary schools.
On Thursday, MCA president Datuk Seri Dr Liow Tiong Lai had said that the police must investigate Mohamad Azli, including whether his remarks were seditious.
On October 5, Mohamad Azli was reported by newspapers Mingguan Malaysia and New Sunday Times (NST) as saying that the upcoming annual Umno meeting in November should discuss abolishing the Chinese vernacular school system as it purportedly promotes racism and anti-establishment sentiments.
In the same report, Mohamad Azli was quoted saying that the government should also mull raising the intake of Malay and Indian students and teachers in Chinese schools to 60 per cent.
Vernacular schools continue to grow in popularity here in Malaysia, with an increasing number of non-Malay parents preferring to send their children to Mandarin- and Tamil-language schools over the Malay-language national schools.
Defenders of Bumiputera special privileges regularly target vernacular schools to deflect demands for equal treatment of the country’s races after decades of race-based affirmative action.
