My very best wishes to the new Yang di-Pertuan Agong, Al-Sultan Abdullah Ri’ayatuddin Al-Mustafa Billah Shah on Installation Day and a happy holiday to all.
I will be taking the day easy with my family, visiting the bird park, catching up with my brothers and nieces, and writing an article.
Amidst all the serious political issues brewing in the last week, I did find a bit of time to attend four community events over the weekend. This posting is to recap these events.
The big event was on Saturday morning, organised by my office. It was a gathering with all the headmasters and PIBG of all public schools in Subang. There are 51 schools in total and we handed over around RM178,000 to the PIBGs. Each PIBG receiving, on average RM3,500. The PIBGs will then distributed the money to 1,700 underprivileged students. The net result is 1,700 underprivileged students will receive RM100 each from my office.
30th of July – We have in total RM300,000 allocated for welfare support for the poor every year. This year, instead of waiting for the poor to approach us or sending our officers to find them, we decided to deputise the PIBGs to identify underprivileged students. The PIBGs then worked with the school teachers and officials to come up with a list of the students most in need. With this one event, we managed to distribute 60% of our annual budget for welfare.
We also updated all the schools on our massive RM2.5 million project to repair all 51 schools in Subang (each school getting RM50,000). This project submitted since May 2019 has been delayed by the fact that the government only has one engineer to evaluate our 51 project Bills of Quantities. The government has since added another engineer to help two weeks ago, and after two months of delay, our Balik Pulih Sekolah project is finally moving. When completed, hopefully in October and November 2019, we will hit 100% of our community budget targets for 2019.
Bearing in mind that my actual work as an MP is to legislate, drive policy making and monitor government budget, this school related programs were designed to help free up some time for my officers to focus on policy research work. Instead, at the moment, my officers are completely bogged down on these projects, which is counter productive to our real duties to do Parliament related work. In short, we need more officers and administrative resources to manage the expanded community budget.
I also attended a Teh Tarik Meet the People Session at Bandar Puteri 8, with YB Ng Sze Han, organised by the colorful Dato Samson. Then on Sunday, I attended the BK2 Malam Muhibbah with residents and also attended prayers at Sri Maha Mariamman Temple at Taman Puchong Utama. In all three events, I was given the opportunity to discuss issues and got to know the community leaders, residents and devotees.
