Welcome to new "settlers" to Janda Baik

Last Saturday we were pleasently surprised to receive a few visitors at our retreat in Janda Baik. A couple was in fact our neighbour who had bought over a beautiful chengal house from their friend.Like us, they fell in love with the charm of Janda Baik's cool all year round weather and fresh air. The other lady with them whose husband is a professor currently on assignment overseas, is building a holiday home on a nearbye piece of property to the chengal house. She has engaged a Cambridge trained young architect to design her dream home. I am sure this will add another fine structure to the many beautifully designed and landscaped villas of Janda Baik. However they are mostly hidden away behind wooded compounds.

Soon to be completed is also a multimillion dollar training centre for UMNO located close to confluence of the river Luro and Benus. It is also understood that the International Islamic University [UIA] has also started work on a MR400 million Pre-University campus at Sum Sum. However what the State and Federal Planners appear to forget is the roads leading to all these are still very much the same except for some minor attempts to improve the roadside drainage and replacements of badly worn out wooden bridges with equally narrow concrete bridges.

MSAbdullah.

PRESERVATION OF NATIONAL ASSETS

I am very concer that so many of our National Assets have been given away to cronies and opportunists in the past, willy nilly by the Powers that be, that I feel the time has come for a general realisation for some form of Constitutional Amendment to be put in place so that no such abuse will ever happen again. I do not think I need to give examples of these abuses, lest such examples will open raw wounds in our memory.

However the recent attempt to exchange the campus of the University of Malaya in Pantai Valley with some tracts of land in Sepang is another example of what some greedy corporate entity can contrive to deprive our nation of our National Assets. If this was not vehemently objected to by all sections of society, this campus would have been sacrificed in the name of economic progress. Can we not learn from the developed nations how their historical sites and institutions of higher learning are preserved for posterity?

I would like to strongly suggest that the release of National Assets for uses other than what they were originally set up for should be made only after a referendum where every adult citizen should be allowed to vote on the issue. Only on getting majority vote can the release be approved.

MSAbdullah.