sept 16 – state public holiday

don’t get excited… i don’t mean this coming sept 16. oh.. and only penangites need to get excited for NEXT YEAR.

while i read in malaysiakini that our new opposition leader, anwar, is mulling sept 16 as a public holiday in all the pakatan rakyat states, penang’s CM, lim guan eng had already decided to take 16 sept as public holiday for penang next year. (yippy! another public holiday for me!)

why sept 16? it’s malaysia day – the day when the then malaya merged with sabah and sarawak to form malaysia, thus malaysia day.  sabah and sarawak had been celebrating sept 16 as independance day all the while, not 31 aug.

well, anwar’s reason for wanting to declare sept 16 as public holiday was, according to malaysiakini, to ‘strengthen the solidarity between malaysians in the peninsular and those in sabah and sarawak.’ hmm…. an attempt to win over BN ministers…. to made them jump ship? yes apparently so.

Anwar announcement on the unprecedented Malaysia Day celebrations in the Peninsular is likely to further undermine the credibility of BN federal government and lure East Malaysian MPs to hop to Pakatan.

According to political observers, the announcment expressly implied that the federal government had ignored and neglected the importance of Sabah and Sarawak since states in the Peninsular do not mark the day with a public holiday.

They said it exposed the deeply-rooted grouses among Sabahans and Sarawakians of “being treated like stepchildren in the nation-building process by BN”.

“Anwar is capitalising on it to show to East Malaysian political leaders that a Pakatan federal government would treat them equally.

“At the same time, he has embossed his position as the Pakatan supremo as well,” said an observer, who declined to be named.

well, if pakatan wants to made sept 16 a public holiday, maybe they should also made a public announcement that malaysia is 45 years old and not 51 years old. the federation of malaysia came into being in 1963. thus if you do a simple mathematics of 2008 minus 1963, it is 45. malaysia is only 45 years old. numbers doesn’t matter you said? well, according to james chin from the malaysian insider, it does matter when suka-suka history had been changed.

so what do you think? perhaps next year we should celebrate malaysia’s independance of 46 years on sept 16?

hari merdeka 2009 – 16hb sept!
ulang tahun merdeka ke-46!