The aide of Rosmah Mansor, Rizal Mansor, has said that the academic qualifications of his boss qualified her to be the patron of PERMATA. If academic qualification is the measure of whether a person is qualified to be the patron, did he mean that among all the civil servants in Education Ministry or Women, Family and Community Development Ministry, no one is more qualified than Rosmah Mansor for the position? This is a huge insult to the civil service in Malaysia.
The only reason that Rosmah Mansor is the patron of PERMATA is that he is the wife of the Prime Minister. If one goes to the website of PERMATA, it is not difficult to spot that the center of attention of the website is Rosmah Mansor instead of the children.
Whether a person can be the patron of PERMATA is not so much of the academic qualifications, it is his/her legitimacy as well as public trust and credibility. Rosmah Mansor has none of it. She is not elected by the people and her husband is leading a minority government that obtained only 48% of the popular votes in the last general election.
Most importantly, Rosmah Mansor has zero public trust and credibility. It is just unconvincing to Malaysians that she has the children’s best interest in heart looking at her luxurious lifestyles, expensive handbags and shopping trips that are disproportionate to her husband’s official salaries and allowances, not to mention the involvement of her son Rizal Aziz in using hundreds of millions USD siphoned from 1MDB to buy luxurious properties and invest in movie in the United States.
In fact, the question of who should be the patron of PERMATA should not arise at the first place. There is no need for a patron for a government agency. Countries with world-class early childhood education such as Finland, Sweden, Singapore etc have no patron for their early childhood education development programs. I would like to repeat again, early childhood education development should not be under the Prime Minister Department. It should be under full ministries such as Education Ministry and Women, Family and Community Development Ministry, as they are better equipped and have more expertise and experiences in the these fields.
All in all, I suggest Rosmah Mansor and her aide not to defend and play victim anymore, just quit.