Where are those the VVIP helped?

Published on: Saturday, October 28, 2017

Text Size:

By C.P. Kui
When I was growing up I never heard of the word “crowd funding”.

Crowd, I knew... because my Form 3 English teacher once told me that I would never stand out in a crowd.

Funding I knew. My English teacher said it was a present continuous tense of the word fund.

Based on what my English teacher said to me, I am confused. More so now when an ex Federal Minister, and a one time Vice President of Umno was detained by the MACC with regards to alleged corrupt practices involving Rm 1.5 billion.

To raise bail for this VVIP’s freedom from further detention, his trusted Lieutenant is organising crowd funding.

Really ?

Do you have to resort to this measure when Rm1.5 billion is floating somewhere around in some people’s pockets ? Surely, the beneficiaries of these funds if MACC can be believed in their assumptions can donate this amount towards the target of Rm 300,000 without batting an eyelid No ?

I was a great follower of our Sabah football team the Rhinos until it came out in the open that some of our players were on the take to throw certain games away. That destroyed some of my faith in humanity and ended my relationship with the Malaysia League. To me, we were crowd funding, the Rhinos actually.

When the crowds stopped going to Stadium Likas, the funding stopped for the State players and for Safa.

See, there is more then one way to skin a cat. You could use words like Support, Donations, Ccontributions and Fund Raising. It wasn’t too long ago when the DAP organised a Fund Raising dinner in solidarity with Junz Wong, the Likas Assemblyman who was suspended by the State Assembly. The purpose of this was presumably to pay for legal fees since the DAP was going to Court to challenge Junz Wong’s suspension.

But the case never went to Court !

So where’s the money that was raised and how much was raised? Don’t tell me he took it with him to Parti Warisan!

Yet he is demanding transparency and accountability in his political rivals, asking them to come clean on every thing.

Junz must be mistaken if he thinks people have short memories.

I am slowly coming to terms with this word crowd funding. Just ask my wife.

She is always crowding around me for funds. In a genuine situation, it would be a good thing to do.

Take the case of the single mother in Menggatal who is struggling to make ends meet after the untimely demise of her husband and the family’s bread winner. She has to work two jobs despite having her own medical problems to support her two school going sons while living under a rackety old house that could possibly pass off as a twin to my car. This is a genuine need for crowd funding.

But when you have VVIPs who have had it all too easy and lived the life millions of Malaysians can only dream about because you walked the corridors of power, what crowd funding are you talking about ?

Just the sale of your wrist watch might be more then sufficient to meet the bail amount set by the Courts bah.

Come on lah fellows. Stop this nonsense. You reap what you sow and if pay back time comes along, so be it.

When my sister started dating, my father would ask her to take me along to the movies.

Her boyfriend would say (not within earshot of my father) that “two is a company and three is a crowd.”

Perhaps that was the start of the word crowd funding.

Because he then had to pay for my ticket for making up the “crowd” and “fund” my meals as well.

C.P. Kui