Ease the Burden of RM1 Trillion Debt

On the 22nd of May 2018, Lim Guan Eng sworn in as the Minister of Finance. Subsequently, he revealed that Malaysia currently is facing more than RM1 trillion in national debt. He blamed the debt on 1MDB.

 

Sister in Islam (SIS) legal officer Nik Shazarani Bakti came out with a crowdfund named “Please Help Malaysia!” to help with the enormous national debt on May 25.

 

 

On May 30, the Finance Minister stepped in and create an official Pakatan Harapan crowdfund known as Tabung Harapan. It is to ensure that the public donation will not be misused. Even the Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad came out and support the initiative. He said that the fund is for people who keen on helping Malaysia financial and people didn’t have to give anything if they didn’t want to.

 

It became a hot issue circulating around in the social media. Let’s take a look into Tabung Harapan trend in Twitter.

 

 

The graph above show the keyword “Tabung Harapan” trend on Twitter. We can see that Tabung Harapan trend quickly rise on the day that it was introduced.

 

#thm and #tabungharapan were the most frequently used hashtags by the netizens when mentioning Tabung Harapan. Besides, there were also some lesser popular hashtags such as #savemalaysia, #sayangimalaysiaku and #tabungharapanmalaysia. But, is the donation drive were well received by the people?

 

 

When we divide the network into cluster group based on their stance towards the Tabung Harapan initiative, 65.44% of the netizens gave positive reaction towards the donation drive. It is almost two-third of the whole network. Only 13.23% were against the idea of Tabung Harapan. The rest were neutral which consist of political critic (7.41%) and news portal (5.26%).

 

 

 

 

 

The account most often mentioned together with “Tabung Harapan” is Najib Razak. They blamed the RM1 trillion national was caused by former Prime Minister Najib Razak through the 1MDB scandal. The second most frequently mentioned account with Tabung Harapan is chedetofficial which is the official Twitter account of Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad.

 

 

Majority of the netizens on Twitter were supportive towards the idea of Tabung Harapan because it will help to rebuild Malaysia from the RM1 trillion debt caused by Najib Razak and his 1MDB scandal. Nevertheless, there are people who against it because they don’t think Tabung Harapan is necessary.