Boohoo.

Sometimes it just doesn’t fail to amaze (and amuse) me that some people can be so myopic in seeing things.

First, it was proclaiming it wasn’t difficult to be a NUSSU President. Then it’s claiming the NUSSU Exco elections being illegitimate.

The choice of words, in my opinion, are at best ill-advised.

Let’s try to see things from the other perspective. Getting 22,000 (actually I think the figure stands at 24,000 now if I’m not wrong) undergraduates to elect a NUSSU President is obviously a nice idea (in fact a few years ago I also felt that should be the way to go). But we all know how a NUSSU President is being elected – he or she is being elected by members of the NUSSU Council, which are the representatives of the undergraduates in the various faculties and constituent clubs. Now let’s try to look at what is happening at the faculty club level. Let’s take my faculty, School of Computing, for instance. The constitution required that 10% of the undergraduate population’s votes in order for the election to stand. We had that this year, that’s why all our candidates who ran for a position in the management committee have been returned to office (kudos to them for wanting to step up and do something for the faculty). However, the sad truth was that we had a majority of undergraduates who did not exercise their rights to vote for the management committee due to various reasons. So if you are really trying to harp on the point of the NUSSU President not being elected by the 22,000 undergraduates in NUS, why not we try to focus the point about having the few thousand undergraduates in the individual faculties first, before we even try to take on a problem on such a macro level. My point is, if we can’t even get 20% of our individual faculties to vote for our faculty club presidents, the sad truth will remain that NUS undergraduates are not ready yet for a campus-wide NUSSU President election.

Furthermore, so what if we really open the elections to all the undergraduates? How many votes do we need for the election to be valid? 10%? 20%? What would happen if only 20% of the undergraduate population vote for the NUSSU President? Can we still safely say that the other 80% of the population wants this particular guy to be the President, even though there’s no way of us knowing? Would this President be someone that represents 100% of the undergraduate population, even though only 20% of people voted him in?

I personally believe that the existing representative system is something that is good enough for the time being. If we can have everyone in the individual faculties voting for their own faculty club presidents, then we can start to talk about having campus-wide elections for the NUSSU President.

Besides, under the current system, it definitely doesn’t look as if it’s all that difficult to be elected as the NUSSU President. But that by no means display the difficulties of being a NUSSU President. The roles and responsibilities of a NUSSU President is probably something so big that it’s not for the faint-hearted. It takes someone with committment, discipline and responsibility to be a NUSSU President. If we are talking about a NUSSU President who is lacking in all these values, it doesn’t matter at all if we have 22,000 undergraduates voting him in as the President – he would still do badly in his job.

Then calling the NUSSU Exco elections as being illegitimate. The word “illegitimate” is a rather big word (and negative too) and going by definition in the dictionary, it means that the elections is “illegal”. Sure, the fact will remain that the NUSSU Exco has been elected without the representatives from 2 of the constituent clubs. But if memories did not fail me, it was made known to all the constituent clubs that NUSSU Exco elections will be held on this date and all the constituent clubs should complete their elections by a certain date before the Exco elections itself. And I guess anyone who bothers enough would then go on and really ask the question that why all the other 12 constituent clubs were able to have theirs elected before this deadline? Of course I’m not trying to put the blame on the two clubs because they really might have genuine reasons to why they couldn’t get their elections done in time, and I can understand that because being an active participant of student activities, I can understand that there are always unforeseen circumstances that may occur any point in time. But if the news has been given as such, why wasn’t it followed? Sure, going by the constitution indeed there wasn’t a need to call the elections until a much later date, but what I couldn’t really accept is that NUSSU has to be the one shouldering the blame for the entire issue, especially when things have been made clear to everyone.

What makes me really disappointed at such comments is that instead of trying to feedback these back to the people who should be in a position to know all these things and act on it, these comments were actually posted on the public domain for everyone to see. Sure, the Internet is one for free speech, but shouldn’t we think of the consequences of our actions, or at the very least, our choice of words? If all the faculty clubs and the Students’ Union are all trying very hard to get students to be involved in matters pertaining to students, why are these comments, which only help to add to student apathy, be allowed at all? Call me a conservative Chinese, but I still believe in the notion of “don’t hang your dirty laundry outside”. If we all really feel that we want the Students’ Union or the faculty clubs to do well and create a better environment for all the students, we should all focus our feedbacks back to the people who are making the decisions, instead of telling the whole world that how crappy or trashy our student bodies are. One of my friends’ favourite quote is “If you can’t make the world a better place, the very least you can do is keep quiet” and in this particular situation I cannot help but agree with such a quote totally.

I’m not an advocate for the Students’ Union, though some will probably never believe especially when I am really aruging for their case here. But it’s just that I can’t help but say a few things to a few people who are not trying to make the world a better place, and instead appear so bitter and immature. Is that what NUS undergraduates are becoming? If I have to choose between apathetic people and immature people, I’ll take the apathetic one any time.