YOURSAY | ‘What’s scary here is being oblivious to the fact that there was a slip-up.’

'500 countries' - I misspoke, says Adham Baba

Vijay47: Health Minister Adham Baba, I’m afraid I must touch a little on demography, a subject possibly as alien to you as geopolitics and medicine. But let me cut to the chase.

Malaysia’s citizenry population as at 4pm on March 30, 2020, was 31,469,552, obviously not including permanent resident Zakir Naik, his wife, and children.

If any of the 31,469,551 had claimed that they had made a mistake in stating that the number of countries in the world came up to 500, they would have immediately been given the benefit of the doubt.

After all, the Good Book does say to err is human. Alas, I’m again afraid that such generosity would not be extended to you.

Your earlier display of knowledge - medical or otherwise - has proven conclusively that you live in a world of your own.

You may recall that you had shared with us a fact that warm water was a sure-fire cure for Covid-19 or at least its prevention. If my memory serves me right, you never did come forth later to explain that it had been mentioned in error.

Unfortunately, world history will always remember you as the doctor from Malaysia who advocated warm water as a cure for or prevention of the virus infection. And this was followed soon enough by your earth-shaking statement that 500 countries lurk on planet Earth.

People would hold firmly that such intelligence comes with the current government DNA.

Adham, you have made a name for yourself in medicine and geography. I suggest you do not venture into history or, God forbid, mathematics.

GooseNBanter: Misspeaking or slip-ups is normal for anyone. But what’s scary here is being oblivious to the fact that there was a slip-up.

It indicates an incongruence between one’s thought and speech process. All of us slip up more often than not. But the difference is in immediately recognising the slip-up in what’s been said, may it be the correctness, completeness or pronunciation, and to correct it before moving on.

We apologise or ask to be excused by our friends, correct ourselves and move on with the conversation. Newscasters, anchors, radio DJs, politicians... anyone and everyone recognise, apologise and rephrase what they say.

The disconnect in recognising the incorrectness, incompleteness or accuracy of what is being said is what’s so bewildering - by both the sender and receiver of the same message; an ex-deputy prime minister and a health minister.

That is what worries me.

Pink Panther: Adham, your 500 countries gaffe could have been easily forgiven if not for your warm water blunder and pointing fingers at the previous government for the tabligh gathering.

But why on earth are you reporting to that other national embarrassment, Umno president Ahmad Zahid Hamidi? More importantly, why report with so much deference and grovel?

Are you desperate to score brownie points for credits you don’t deserve? You felt left out and decided to speak out? As usual, you blundered. Again.

Unfortunately for the country, you simply are not in the same league as your director-general Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah or the previous minister. Everyone knows it.

Unspin: The most likely scenario was that Adham participated in a webinar hosted by the World Health Organisation (WHO). He was certainly not an active participant nor an important member of the webinar like what he wanted people to believe.

With 500 participants, he would be lucky if he got the chance to speak. Assuming that he got lucky, he would be given a limited time to post one or two questions to the panel speakers.

By the way, most popular video conferencing solutions in the market do not even support that many simultaneous users. For example, Skype and Zoom only allow a maximum of 50 and 100 participants per session respectively.

Some other solutions like Cisco Webex allow up to 500 participants but that is mostly used for webinars - not interactive video conference calls.

Salvage Malaysia: Now we have photos of the deputy minister of the Rural Development Ministry with his birthday brouhaha. Is coming out from your home to send a birthday cake to a deputy minister a violation of the movement control order (MCO) or not?

The amount of non-stop nonsense coming from our politicians is incredible. The government is arresting and compounding the average rakyat for violation of the MCO without giving them a chance to defend themselves.

But all these Perikatan Nasional leaders are blatantly violating it without any penalty. Boy, I can’t wait for GE15.

Clever Voter: Adham is an embarrassment. One wonders whether he has been prepared to take on his minister’s post.

As a government minister, he grossly underestimated the intelligence and misread the expectations of him. It comes with the job that he must at least show minimum intelligence, and ability to show empathy and to show reasonable understanding of the issues and concerns.

But his poor performance reiterates the lack of depth in a small pool of talent Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin can trust. One cannot imagine how are the others.

Annonnymous 080: Let’s cut him some slack. As an ordinary MP before, he would never even be called or spoken to by the prime minister or let alone, Umno presidents. Thus, he was so excited and after Zahid said tahniah (congratulations), and it would have further elevated him.

What he meant was there were 500-odd participants.

We all have bigger fish to fry. Let’s move on. After all, didn’t many people here say this government is not legit and their members are suspect?

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