JANUARY 11 ― People can live longer and healthier if local council elections are reintroduced in Malaysia.
Whoa, what?!
Circle back to this at the end.
Most discourses about electing town councils in the country are mutated to merely binary choices, like choosing between Coke or Pepsi.
In the mind of the reader, the truly average reader, it really does not matter. They both give you diabetes in the long run, so why bother picking either?
Don’t pick, carry on and live the inevitable disease heading your way. Instead, invest in health insurance.
Except it is not.
This is the only thing to be shared today. One of the choices, the one with voted-in local councils fosters active and vibrant societies. There is a way to prevent diabetes through the ballot box.
The single biggest reason why our nation of 33 million outstrips other Asian countries to be the fattest nation on the continent is down largely to our people’s devotion to a sedentary lifestyle and destructive diet.
We eat junk with an unparalleled zeal, wash it down with sugared, creamed up drinks in cute plastic cups and let our TVs or smartphones dominate our couch time.
Don’t worry, the kids are safe, they are in their rooms playing video games while stuffing themselves. Enough snacks in the fridge in case of a zombie apocalypse. Cardio is overrated.
The health ministry numbers would indicate the diabetes, hypertension and chronic kidney failure rates rise with levels of development. Puchong would have more non-communicable diseases (NCD) than Sabak Bernam, easily.
Right, right, you’d be thinking, but how is that related to local councils?
(Segue, this is part of our ongoing “Getting to be a developed country through elected local councils” series.)
The local council belongs to the community. The community shapes and dictates what type of life its members experience.
All the locals cannot fit into the town hall or have the time to run it, so they vote in their representatives. Those reps are accountable to the community. They carry the will of the locals, election to election.
This is the theory.
Critics rub their hands in glee, it is easy to unpick the theory. Some elected councils — more than not, sadly — fall under the weight of expectations and realities of people being indifferent or incompetent.
Sure.
But compare apples and apples.
Currently our councils are run by civil servants, the senior leadership transferred in from all over Malaysia rather than local born. It’s a job, not a passion. Done perfunctorily, not as a dream to make lives better for their own.
So, while questioning the efficacy of elected councils is fair, it must be measured in competition with appointed councils filled with those uninvested in the people who live in the councils.
How many well-run parks and sports facilities are there in the Klang Valley, in its 13 councils?
Want to see how determined the folks at the council are about the council under their care, just look at their playing fields, or the absence of them.
For the uninitiated, the use of space is under local councils. No mall swallows an old pitch nor new developments approved if the council is displeased with the sports options available within them.
Miserably, in the present, local council administrations are always pleased with developers. Look out of your home window and decide for yourself, is this good enough?
When you want to take your children out for a runabout on a Saturday, or sign them up for the youth football leagues, and realise the park is a 30-minute drive away or there are no sporting programmes run by councils, then the answers about the present can be found in these.
The councils are run with sports and facilities as optional objectives.
Propagation of sports programmes or working arm in arm with residential associations or village committees or youth associations or NGOs to facilitate a substantial sports calendar and culture is fiction.
Go and ask any grassroots leader’s experience to push for sustainable sports programmes or spaces in the council. There are nightmare stories and then their sequels.
Local councils are supposed to be the protectors of our sporting and recreational spaces, the true guardians.
As cities shrink, they presumably dig their heels in and balance between skyscrapers and green lungs — sports pitches, gardens, cycling lanes and swimming pools. Quite the contrary is the behaviour of appointed councils.
Imagine how much more defending elected local councils are capable of.
Those parks could have brought down NCD related deaths.
The local council administrators do not fret about how they do not place promotion of physical activities as a priority.
The use of “circle back” at the start was a bit of a pun. There is no park, so nobody is circling back, just all our collective backs to concrete walls.
There is another thing apparent here, maybe not spotted in the first read. Unlike every article about local council elections, this one talks about what local councils can do and therefore why those positions need to be elected from the community, not appointed by politicians at the state capital.
The usual ones are captivated by who might be heading the councils in case of an election rather than what they can do.
They render all the massive gains from an elected council seem miniscule, and unnecessary for debate. They say it changes who cuts the ribbons at launches, and for them that’s Armageddon.
To them, it’s all about race, race and more race. Not the type run on a track, unfortunately.
This probably stems from their own insouciance to sports. I hope they remember this when their doctor reminds them to exercise.
If they played sports, they’d know it’s not the man but the game he brings. So many things these opponents to elected councils do not know, it will be regrettable if the casualty list stealthily grows due to their ignorance.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
