The Undi 18 And The Anti Hopping Law Have Come Home To Bite You In The Butt

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This handsome guy above is 39 year old Ustaz Fawwaz, who has TWO wives and ELEVEN children.  He is a graduate in Arabic from the Al Azhar University in Cairo. 
He recently beat Nurul Izzah for the Parliamentary seat of Permatang Pauh by a margin in excess of 5,000 votes. 
Talk is Ustaz Fawwaz is well known in Permatang Pauh as a religious teacher. 
Nurul Izzah is not "unknown" to the voters in Permatang Pauh. She was the incumbent MP in Permatang Pauh.  Yet this time she lost by over 5,000 votes. I did say earlier that Nurul will lose her seat because the feedback was that she rarely visited her constituency. But I thought that UMNO candidate would win. It looks like the handsome Ustaz won.
Another explanation is that the new 18 to 20 year old voters (under the Undi 18 age group)  do not know Nurul Izzah as well as they may know Ustaz Fawwaz. And with 5.8 million of them, the Undi-18 voters form quite a chunk of loose change inside the vote bank.

This is not an unlikely scenario. Even 25 year olds today may not read or be aware of everything that goes on around them. I dont think 18 year olds and 19 year olds in the country even read newspapers, including the Malay newspapers. One report said that some of the Undi 18 age group have not even heard of Anwar Ibrahim. So their sources of information are very limited.

But thanks to Anwar Ibrahim's religious indoctrination of the school system beginning from the 1980s, most young people today know the ustaz. An ustaz has to be a good guy. A universal detergent - it can clean everything. So there is your karma. It has come back to bite you in the butt.
I do hope that Nurul Izzah will earn her merits and run again for a Parliamentary seat. And become as popular as her mother Wan Azizah who has won in Bandar Tun Razak. Congratulations. 


But like the Anti Hopping Law, the Undi-18 is another piece of poorly thought legislation.  Our kids are not yet ready to ponder the country's future. 
18 year olds may not have jobs, they possibly live with their parents and dont pay rents, housing loans, quit rents, water and electricity bills, road tax etc. Most likely they still get pocket money from their parents. Just let them be. They can get involved in voting later when they are entering adulthood and facing the realities of life.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.
By Syed Akbar Ali 

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