Wei Kiat's Blog

The most important question: Are those people running for the councillors good enough for the job?

First, we have to take note of a very important point. As long as you volunteer to be a councillor, it is a matter of time before you are one. Basically the election is about chosing who will become the councillor president. There are no Quality Control at all. All the councillors we got are self volunteered. This may be good, but judging from last year's batch, being a councillor is really about being a figure head. Only pitifully few are doing anything, and that excludes the president (as far as I can see).

This year, we will be having the election soon, and the JC1s start campaigning during the morning assemblies. The problem is, some of their short "presentation" or campaign speech with often turned into out of tuned jingles and lame skits may be entertaining, but really, being a leader is not about entertaining your fellow schoolmates. There were no mention of what they would do if they were elected president, and they did not share anything about their policies, or even properly introduce their background and past experiences. I take this as they have none. All they did were to go up and clown around (some pretending to be power puff girls, while others trying to act cute) How has this got to do with their ability to serve as a president? AJC is NOT a retarded children's insitution. Who are they trying to kid? They have totally no substances, no plan, so just say it. Pretending to be powerpuff girls isn't going to save AJCville from any plague, ghosts or Mojo-Jojo. If I were to be running for president this year, this is what I will say instead.


"Stop listening to others who were clowning around, pretending to be powerpuff or curry puffs.
"Listen to me. I am Tay Wei Kiat, and this is what I will do for the school....."
"Vote for me, or risk turning AJC into a kindergarden."
"Thank you."

There, short and sweet, and no need for any redundant props. And judging from the quality of candidates making a fool of themselves so far, my simple speech would have earned me quite a number of votes. But if this were TCHS, this was not the case.

They had to make real political rallying speeches, introducing themselves, their visions, the way they work and spice up their speech with their own unique style, be it serious, humourous, or out of the world. That is the way it should be done. The result of these is that the president who finally got elected from a total of around 4 or 5 candidates is most suitable for the job and would succeed in leading the student population and caring for their welfare, which they did. We even had councillors that organised a successful TCHS open house with less than S$200. The original budget given by the school was a few hundren thousand, but our councillors were just too efficent.

In AJC, there were overwhelming amount of candidates, and it is next to impossible to remember who did what and said what during the "election speeches". In the end, most students would no doubt just vote blindly on a piece of paper filled with candidates' name, just like what we did last year. The trick to winning the election is actually trying to make as many friends in AJC as possible, so that they would vote for you.

I was told by someone in the higher authority in AJC that if something in AJC needs improvement, the student who notice it should raise the issue to those concerned. Ok. Someone please post the contact numbers of all the candidates here, and i shall call them one by one.

The thing is, alot of things that were organised and planned looks good on paper, but those who underwent them did not think it is good. This is why the school and the councillors had been organising activities after activities but the school spirit only inched up a tiny bit. Also, after many applications later, the amount of award AJC received was still stucked at 3, while others had leaped forward over the years.