People Power begins at points like these

Some people might have heard about hoo-ha being raised over the Selangor Water Restructuring Exercise. Many probably have no idea, or wonder what the big deal is. In short, the Federal Government wants to directly buy up poor-performing water concession companies' assets. If this already gets your hackles up, go here and find out more:

http://www.airuntukrakyat.com/

There's a great PDF link on the right bar, about one page down from the top.

Here's the long version, which starts with some questions:

- would you ever consider drinking water directly out of your tap?

- do you know that people in the UK (and several other countries) do so, as a matter of course?

- do you ever look at all the water filters that people put outside and/or inside their house, and wonder why don't they just pool that money together for cleaner water out of the tap?

- have you thought about how regularly we seem to have price hikes on our water?

- have you wondered why water can seem to be such a problem in an equatorial rainforest country like Malaysia, where we have rainfalls that, if properly channelled, can wash Singapore right off the map? (sorry, couldn't resist)

Now that you're thinking about water, which is a fundamental human need; here are some facts about these water concession companies that our wonderful government wants to buy off:

- they are in RM6.4billion of debt

- Syabas, a semi-private company (that is the sole distributor of water in KL and Selangor), will benefit greatly

- some of them are run by the guy who runs Syabas

- they want to hike up the price every 3 years from now until 2030

If that stinks like our water does, take action at http://www.airuntukrakyat.com/ . If not yet, read on.

An unfortunately great number of Malaysians already think that there's nothing they can do. Why fight, when these buggers in power can do what they want, the rakyat be damned?

Okay here's a dramatic answer to that: if we keep on doing nothing, they'll keep pushing harder and harder until finally, we've had enough. When we react then, it becomes nothing short of a revolution, because we've been oppressed and bullied and condescended upon for so long that there's a lot of negativity to release.

On the other hand, if we keep up our momentum of People Power / Makkal Sakthi, we're reminding those in government that we're still watching, that we want better and more (or less). We're keeping things civilised, even if they're not. We stand by our beliefs and our ideals, even if they have no idea or don't care.

The more pragmatic answer to that question, of course, is they we're giving feedback to them. Simple as that. Adding our voices, our views, our opinions to the mix; hoping that one day, they'll hear, they'll see, they'll do something about it.

And that is where People Power begins. One voice.

[Edit 9/4/09] There's also a site that spoke to an MP about it - check out PopTeeVee at http://popteevee.popfolio.net/default.aspx?e=66 .