Former law minister Zaid Ibrahim said the previous five-year plans were a waste of time and money as they were never discussed at great length by the ruling party and were probably prepared by “some senior civil servants with the help of foreign consultants”.
Zaid said the public would have been impressed by the “breadth and depth” of the previous plans, but nothing substantial or significant was implemented fully and targets were not achieved after the five-year period.
“What happened to our great industrialisation plan, the plan for unity and rebirth of the nation? What happened to achieving the dreams of 2020 where the country will prosper like First World countries?” he asked in a Facebook post.
“What happened to science and innovation in our education system? Where are the plans for a high-income economy and the empowerment of the people?”
He said all of them remained “plans in the archives of the Economic Planning Unit of the Prime Minister’s Office”.
Before embarking on a five-year plan, Zaid urged finance minister Tengku Zafrul Aziz to firstly focus on dealing with Covid-19 by having a detailed plan which should be debated thoroughly in Parliament.
The former Kota Bharu MP said the standards of education must also be improved by finding a way to deal with quotas without sacrificing quality and by instilling competitiveness.
“How will we also produce graduates that are good enough to join the government medical service permanently? How do we produce graduates who will find work at a reasonable salary and earn enough to pay their National Higher Education Fund Corporation (PTPTN) loans?
“Don’t expect our education minister to prepare this plan, just ask some good educationists to do that and submit the plan for Parliament to approve. This will be better than the big-sounding five-year plan,” he said.
Zaid said the civil service must also be revamped by focusing on a pension scheme that is sustainable in the long term, and we must also find ways to reduce wastage in terms of removing pensions to ministers who were already well paid and, in some cases, super-wealthy.
He also said the government must find ways to reduce the number of appointments of advisers and special envoys so that more can be done for the public instead of their Cabinet colleagues.
Additionally, the government should prepare a plan to improve agriculture radically by increasing support for agriculture and food industries minister Ronald Kiandee.
“Ronald is a good minister but he needs political support to revamp and make abandoned land, some 30 million acres, useful and productive. He needs political will to make the Malaysian Agricultural Research and Development Institute (Mardi) more attuned to the needs of the nation and farmers,” he said.
Lastly, Zaid said, the finance ministry should issue five more licences to those who want to lend money to businesses at affordable rates, adding that the big banks should relocate as they do not support small businesses and budding entrepreneurs.
He said if Tengku Zafrul could prepare these plans, they should be handed over to larger political parties for them to deliberate, otherwise they would not be implemented.
Zaid urged the finance minister to make China a model for Malaysia as the success of their five-year plan was due to meticulous planning and utilisation of intelligent people to do the work and not foreign consultants.
“The plans also get endorsed and supported fully by the political machinery. That’s the country we need to have special envoys to study how they manage the economy. We don’t need special envoys to the Middle East or elsewhere.
“We need the model of the most successful country in human history to follow if we are serious about changing Malaysia’s failing trajectory,” he said.