badawiI suppose when you have grand, long-term goals, you try to coach it in the most general terms possible to allow for a breadth of interpretation. The problem with repeating yourself again and again is, if what you say isn’t backed up with concrete proposals for action, everything remains up in the air and unresolved.

Which essentially means, no one knows what you’re talking about. It’s very much like envisioning More’s Utopia, or Plato’s Republic, except nothing specific is said about it. In the end, this “vision” appears to be nothing more than a Shangri-La shrouded in obscure declarations and descriptive statements about what “it will be like” rather than “how we’re going to get there”.

Which is how I feel about Badawi’s recent statement - one among many - about Islam Hadari: we all know what the “golden age of Islam” represents because he’s told us so many times, but he’s not said a thing to date on he’s going to get us there. Cue his recent proposal to the OIC reported in the NST today.

The way PM Badawi portrays “Islam Hadari”, even I am interested. But I don’t quite know what I’m supposed to be interested about. Are there proposals to streamline university curricular? Is there a definite plan to increase the competitiveness of Bumiputeras in the fields of science and elsewhere? What are the decisions to be made?

Am I as much in the dark as the man in the street, or have there been announcements already? And hasn’t PM Badawi been in office since, what, October 2003? I’m hoping all of this isn’t a pipe dream.