Education is vital to a country's progress.

Unbelievable! Astonishing! But it is a fact that there is at least one village in Sabah which is more backward than some or the worst places on earth! There is Sabah is a village of approximately 200 families who do not seem to think right, do not know how to differentiate between right and wrong or good and bad. And the name of this village is special too. It is known as Kampung Istimewa which is Bahasa Malaysia for Special Village.

There we have all the villagers who refuse to really participate in the process of selecting the right representative. They do not want to know any opposition candidate. Yet, they are apparently not stupid as they have a banner up informing opposition parties not to campaign in their village.

Or are those people so stupid that they have become someone’s puppets on a string, obeying every move of a puppeteer who, if there is one, must be from the governing party. And from what they said, they seem to refuse to see the weakness of previous politicians.

They knew that their previous elected representative, who was from the governing political party, had not fulfilled his promise to build the villagers a water tank. Yet, they believed the next elected representative from the same party would do it for them although they had never met or known the person at all.

And when they were asked of the opportunities the ruling party had given to help the poor of their town, they could not think of anything. And those approximately 700 Kampung Istimewa residents lived in “tattered conditions with many youths jobless and the others, working in low-wage jobs as factory workers or fishermen’, according to a writer in The Malaysian Insider.

Some would say, ”Serves them right to support so blindly despite living in such conditions and with promises not carried out.”

Can we actually blame them? Could it be a lack of knowledge and education? Even among our more educated ones, there are those who refuse to see that there is a better alternative. And any alternative must be better if our future seems to be stuck while other countries such as Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines push ahead economically despite having less natural resources than our country. Furthermore, if the alternative does not prove to be better, we can always go back to the first party after five years.

And the worst, most unbelievable part of it all is that those villagers consider the citizens who voted against the government as traitors. Do they understand the democratic process? Obviously no! They do not understand that speaking out our problems and voting in people we strongly believe can help us solve them is a basic right in a democracy.

When such basic things are incomprehensible to those people, where is the place for reason and understanding? Nowhere! Unless we change that and such a change can only come about with education. That is why education is of great importance in developing a nation.

The opposition of course respected the right of those people not to listen to it, but the opposition must not just walk away and leave those poor folks to suffer in their ‘darkness’. Win or lose, the opposition must be willing to take education to those people so that their minds can see the light of knowledge and truth. Education is the tool to knowledge and better understanding of the various issues of life and truth.