When will Malaysian civil servants and politicians leave their egos at home and just serve the rakyat?
The district officer (DO) in Padang Terap, Kedah Hakim Ariff Md Noor is so vain, that he named the mini local stadium after himself.
To blatantly call the stadium “Hakim Ariff” would have immediately attracted criticism, so he thought he would be clever and spell his name in reverse.
Many people asked whether Ffira Mikah was a person or thing.
One mother from Kuala Nerang said, “My son, who is keen on football, asked me if Ffira Mikah was a real person, because the stadium was named after him.
“I said, “Who?”. He showed a photo of the newly named stadium. I was applying my make-up and looked up in the mirror. I said, it’s not called Ffira Mikah. Its Hakim Ariff.
“He said, “No mak, the stadium is called ‘Ffira Mikah’. Look! So, I turned around and true enough it was ‘Ffira Mikah’. We realised the it was the DO’s name in reverse.”
Other netizens have also discovered that Hakim Ariff had reversed his name when naming the local stadium, but he claimed that the name had been approved during the administrative meeting.
Hakim Ariff has been furiously back-pedalling since the expose. He said that the name Ffira Mikah was a combination of Arabic and Spanish or Greek.
He said, “It has nothing to do with my name. It has implicit meaning. It was proposed during the administrative meeting.
“In Spanish or Greek, ffira means something great whereas mikah in Arabic means angel, he was quoted as saying by Sinar Harian.
However, an excerpt in this news report said, “Google does not recognise the word ffira as Spanish or Greek. It auto-detects the word as Bulgarian and carries the meaning “wastage”.
The stadium recently received a RM200,000 uplift.
Hakim Ariff is desperate to restore his tarnished reputation: “I’m not looking for glamour. My wish is for Padang Terap to become clean, beautiful and cheerful.
“I don’t want this district to be like in the past, people do not know the true story and are making assumptions.”
Here are 10 assumptions:
- Hakim Ariff is a man whose ego could not be contained.
- He thought he could get away with this exercise in vanity. He failed.
- This is Ketuanan Melayu at its worst.
- Are all Kedah civil servants this arrogant and boastful? The MB sets a bad example.
- Football fans will forever mock Hakim Ariff for his bad taste in names.
- Since when did Malay civil servants pretend to be knowledgeable in Greek and Spanish? Next thing, Hakim Ariff will claim to be a Latin scholar.
- Does Hakim Ariff even play football?
- The people who attended the administrative meeting to name the stadium must be minions of Hakim Ariff.
- When he was caught out, he denied everything. This is a typical Umno-Baru and PAS trait.
- Hakim Ariff will now be associated with being “wasteful”.
Poor man. To add insult to injury, the KN Kiara Football Club which manages the stadium said it had taken down the signage of the stadium’s new name, removed any reference to it on its Facebook and will not use “Ffira Mikah” in any promotional material.
They should have acted before furious netizens criticised them.
Note: Googling ‘ffira’ did not produce any result.