I think we should stop pretending that the debate about our Malay language national schools and the education system has anything to do with national unity.

I think Umno leaders like Mukhriz Mahathir are cleverly ignoring the fact of the racist regime in Malaysia today in the debate about shutting down Chinese and Tamil schools.

Nobody expects to be judged by their actions or on their own merits in Malaysia. Your treatment at the hands of the government for jobs, university places, promotions, licenses, business contracts or welfare support will depend on your skin colour, your religion, your race, your cultural affiliation and the language you speak.

Non-Malay parents in Malaysia are acutely aware of their obligations towards their children in Malaysia. One day, their children may have to work permanently abroad when the Malaysian economy is reduced to rubble by Umno's corruption and greed.

One day, their children may have to emigrate when Umno's chauvinistic, jingoistic, scapegoat-ing and dagger-waving exercises push them abroad permanently. In fact, many non-Malay parents are talking about not ‘if’ but ‘when’. Sooner or later it will happen because Umno cannot reform and will need someone to blame.

It is foremost in their consciousness that they are trying to prepare their children for an ultra- competitive globalised world abroad on the one hand, and for the hostile reality of Umno's apartheid system of racial privileges (lets be frank - it is called racial oppression - not privileges) in our own country.

In their eyes, the Malay language national schools are catering for a different Malay-Muslim reality altogether, perhaps a blissful syariah-compliant theocratic utopian caliphate, but it is a reality and expectation totally divorced from the challenges and obstacles that non-Malay parents expect their kids to face in tougher times ahead.

Having foisted a failed, uncompetitive and unrealistic monolingual education system on the average working and middle class Malay, Mukhriz brilliantly proposes to make up for Umno's bungling ineptitude that destroyed meritocracy and the high academic standards in our former English language national schools by suggesting shutting down the Chinese and Tamil schools.

Once again it shows the reflex jerk that Umno leadership hopefuls like Mukhriz have hardwired into their minds in that solving Malay problems can only mean shutting down non-Malay institutions since as you know, the Chinese and Indians are always to blame, at least according to Umno-sponsored history teachers - Utusan Malaysia, Bernama, Kursus Induksi trainers and the Biro Tata Negara goose-steppers.

The problem for Umno is that the average Malay is beginning to question if further handicapping and discriminating against Chinese and Indians is going to solve real Malay problems.

Shutting down the Chinese and Tamil vernacular schools is not going to solve non-competitiveness, loss of confidence, poor English language skills, plummeting academic standards, lack of meritocracy, poor job prospects nor reverse the world's rapidly accelerating globalisation processes for the Malay community.

The fact is that Chinese, Tamil and English language international and private schools are the schools of choice for many non-Malay parents today. This is because our national education system is producing unemployable, monolingual graduates.

It has produced a string of monolingual diplomats who cannot even string a sentence in English together to shame us on the world stage. It is Umno's apartheid system that has made meritocracy a dirty word - in our schools, in our universities, in our work places, in PKNS, in our minds and in our children's minds.

Non-Malay parents have long accepted that the plummeting academic standards and the racial discrimination is the price they will have to pay for appeasing Umno's political opportunism in the hopes that the appeasement will forestall an even more rapid erosion of their status as third or fourth to tenth class citizens in their own country.

But their hopes that the appeasement might deter Umno from pushing institutionalised racism, opportunistic scapegoat-ing and government-sponsored apartheid to the forefront of Malay nationalist politics has been steadily eroded by 30 years of bitter experience.

If non-Malay parents believed that by schooling their kids in Malay language schools there would be even a remote chance of securing equal treatment for the next generation of non-Malay citizens regardless of ethnicity (laughable given Umno's vision of things), they would have all enrolled their children in Malay national schools by now.