My love affair with Malaysia

General Elections 2013

After my last work contract ended just days after Parliament was dissolved, I walked into the local party office and volunteered.  The lady there took one look at me and said "You could be a PACA trainer".  I asked what a PACA was and had to explain I had no PACA knowledge or experience but she said, "You will be OK".  I eventually signed up to attend PACA training at my local constituency and the PACA coordinator there said to me, "You can be a station master." "But I have never even been a PACA", I protested but I ended up leading PACAs in a small polling station.  It was my introduction but, typical of me:  after seeing how PACA machinery work, I started to imagine how the processes could be improved, not just the PACA process itself but the way they were to be organised.   I realised that even when my polling station voted overwhelmingly for change, change will not come as long as the rest of the country lacked the knowledge, organisation and temperament to seek and defend the idea of change.   In elections, it was always the campaigning that get all the interest and resources;  PACA work really only starts after nomination day.  Feeling it was an overlooked but critical part of winning elections, I decided to focus on building permanent PACA machineries in places where they were most needed.

Teluk Intan By elections 2014

I got a call from Rajiv, my local assemblyman in PJ just two days after nomination day to ask if I could help with recruiting PACAs for the by-election in 10 days time, as nothing was done on the ground at that stage.  I said I probably could round up 30 people.  My phone number and email went round Klang Valley and within a week, I had 70 persons signed up and trained, with all their paperwork submitted. I had daily calls with the  election agent, Howard (who later became my boss) and eventually he trusted me enough to let PJ PACAs manage four stations entirely.  When I finally arrived on site, I had to mediate between inflated egos of party leaders who have descended on the by-election, each seeking a role for their presence.  It was  quite a task but nothing diplomacy and problem-solving skills could not handle.  I also had the opportunity to observe the workings of PACA administration at close quarters and the stress of having to organise everything in the very short window of time.  We lost by just a few votes but it was in the cauldron of that by-election that the basic principles governing the roles of the station master and the PACA coordinator were established in my mind, together with the basic management and people skills they needed to have in their roles.

Sarawak State Elections 2016

Deciding that the urban areas were pretty well served, I chose to work in the areas that nobody wanted to go - the interiors of Borneo.  With the Sarawak elections looming, I started with talking to the local party leaders to persuade them of the approach to build permanent PACA machineries.  Just getting a grudging non-commitment meant I was able to travel to the interiors with a makeshift mandate.  Self-funded monthly trips to Sarawak gave me the opportunity to sell the idea of building machineries.  Taking the better part of a week each trip, I ran up to eight training and talks each visit, eventually reaching more than half the constituencies the party contested in.   Along the way, I learnt a lot about the many local cultures and started to dream of linking up the two halves of my country, helping each one understand the other and educating middle class Malaysians that the way we think is not representative of ,the whole country.  On my visit for the elections itself, I had to leave the state before Election Day, being already on the blacklist.  But my work was done in Sarawak and I spent Election Day at home answering queries from all over the state.  It was enlightening to see Malaysia as she really is and how much work to do to help her grow into the nation that she could be.

General Elections 2018

Leaving election fatigue behind in Sarawak, I started working in the interiors of Sabah, again making monthly trips to build the machinery.  It was rewarding working with KadazanDusun & Muruts, again learning the culture and how they differ from Sarawakians and peninsular Malaysians.  I  was proud that one team I guided reached the point of being able to train their own PACAs and assess their own progress & risks as well as track discrepancies in their electoral roll.  Meanwhile, we started recruiting  PJ PACAs to go to Borneo. trained in cultural understanding and sensitivity.  For election day, we deployed over 200 PJ PACAs to nine locations in Peninsular and Borneo, all self-funded and self-organised.  We worked with local PACA machinery, some which we have trained, and in one case, we took over the machinery itself.  We redeployed PACAs at short notice to locations that needed them most, supplying the administration to do so ourselves.  On election day, I was in Tenom and had to take care of my newborn while tending to PACA queries from all over Malaysia while my Sabahan wife was on PACA duty. It wasn't easy with my phone and email hacked & rendered unusable: apparently, I was on the targeted list.  It was an exhausting day but it all worth it and change began in Malaysia.