![]() “Singapore is my home away from home and I want her to do better as a country,” he said. He also wrote about how he was organising distribution of food and essential items to dormitory workers during the pandemic, including while he was hospitalised with Covid-19 symptoms. With no clear explanation offered, Zakir said that his lobbying for equal treatment of migrant workers and raising of social issues were the only possibilities he could think of for the “adverse record”. No further explanation was given to him, Zakir told TODAY. This followed a closed door discussion between Manpower Minister Tan See Leng and an unnamed individual helping him with the situation. The most recent reply from MOM was that the status was due to an “administrative error” and that it should have just been reflected as “ineligible”, he added. Zakir said on Wednesday that after follow-ups at the Police Cantonment Complex and with the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA), he was informed that no such record was found. He referred to a parliamentary reply in August 2018 by then Manpower Minister Josephine Teo, who said that a migrant worker may have an adverse record if he “committed an offence under Singapore laws or was found to have infringed MOM’s regulations”. “The system stated, ‘This worker has an adverse record with a government agency’,” Zakir wrote, without specifying which system that was. On Wednesday, Zakir wrote that he was informed by his company that his work permit could not be renewed, after it expired on May 24 this year. That was his second victory in the competition, having also won the inaugural edition in 2014. In 2015, his poem about migrant life and how he misses his wife and children won first prize in the Migrant Worker Poetry Competition. Zakir had grown in prominence for speaking about issues faced by the migrant community here through his poetry and writing. “I only raised these issues because I saw them happening around me and it was unbearable,” the 42-year-old said.
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