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Sunday, October 19, 2014

Preferential treatment not the issue – wastage is

Corrupt practices mean special programmes do not benefit the people for whom it is intended.
COMMENT

by TK Chua
I donrasuah’t mind a little inequality, a little favouritism, and a little preferential treatment, so long as all these are done properly, efficiently and competently. It may sound like an oxymoron right now, but please bear with me.
Did we not have “peace dividends”? Yes, for years we fought the communist insurgents who took away our resources and manpower. We did it at the expense of our other national needs so that we may all live in the system we preferred and cherished.
When the insurgency was over, we got “peace dividends”. Resources and manpower that were used to fight the communists were now channelled for more productive use.
I think we should look at our annual budget and national policies in the same way. We should go for competency and efficiency dividends. Please let me elaborate.
At the risk of many disagreeing with me, I think we should all accept a little favouritism, preferential treatment and inequality if such acceptance could provide us national harmony and cohesion.
I see no future to the endless bickering and quarrels among ourselves. I see no way out of the quagmire we have dug ourselves into. I can only pray and hope that someday this nation will come to terms with it and find peace with itself.
So this is my take – if we want to practice favouritism and preferential treatment, let’s do it competently and professionally. Let’s do it with minimum leakage, wastage and corruption. Let’s provide privileges in the most efficient way so that we can achieve our objectives in the quickest way and at a minimum cost to society.
You see, I was attracted to what Datuk Nicholas S Zefferys said at a discussion on Budget 2015 organised by the Asian Strategy & Leadership Institute recently. The issues raised were leakages, wastage and graft which may sound mundane to many by now, but which remain the most protracted issues confronting Malaysia today.
Not surprisingly, the Malaysian International Chamber of Commerce in the same forum cited, among others, the same issues of graft, leakages, and complacency.
So you see, it is always the leakages, wastage, graft and complacency that are the main culprits, not the privileges or preferential treatments that we often quarrel about.
When we embrace incompetence, we discard efficiency and value for money. Whatever programmes of “preferential treatment” we undertake will be many times more expensive than it has to be.
If we are corrupt, these programmes will end up benefitting those running the programmes, not the target groups it was intended to benefit.
If we are wasteful, the same allocations from the government will end up supporting a smaller number of programmes.
If wastage is the result of unchecked incompetency, the resulting leakages will be a deliberate siphoning of funds that were intended for preferential treatment programmes but that ended up financing something else.
If we look around us, I think there are enough examples of how these programmes are hijacked, side-tracked and sabotaged by incompetency, wastage, leakages, and graft.
If we are able to tackle these head-on, the dividends would be more than sufficient for us to continue providing favouritism and preferential treatment to whichever target groups we want.
TK Chua is an FMT reader

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