By T.K. Chua
What Christophe Mueller, the outgoing MAS chief executive officer, said about MAS employees and its procurement system, is pertinent and applicable, and not just for MAS. The whole civil service and the government procurement programmes are in need of similar overhaul and revamp.
The National Union of Flight Attendants Malaysia has hit back at Mueller, arguing that he did not understand local work culture. According to them, taking a short nap while on the job is quite common in airline operations.
Maybe Mueller was describing the situation in MAS metaphorically, but whatever it was, Nufam is engaging in nothing more than self-denial.
If MAS was bloated with many employees doing almost nothing, the same can be said about the civil service and other GLCs. As the civil service is many times bigger than MAS, a revamp there would give Malaysia a much bigger boost.
For too long, political considerations have remained the main impetus of the growth of the civil service. We can’t deny that the civil service has been used as the “employer of last resort” for decades. An economy depending on creating fake jobs will not sustain itself in the long run. Ultimately, something else must give, as manifested today by a higher tax burden, inflation and low productivity growth.
No one can deny the important roles of civil service. This is where sound macroeconomic policies, human capital development, national resource management, law and order and national security issues are formulated and managed.
A civil service that is lean and mean will be more agile to react to the needs of changing times and circumstances. A bloated civil service is often caught in its own obese inertia – lethargic, slow and unimaginative.
We have been just skirting around this problem without giving it serious thought. Every few years a new strategy will be devised, purportedly to streamline the civil service, but nothing substantive has happened.
It is about time we do something, with no gimmicks and no pretence.
Pemandu is a hoax based on my opinion.
The same goes with for the procurement programme.
By all means help the bumiputra to pursue their dreams, but we just can’t ignore the value for money aspect in whatever we do. We have too many suppliers whose whole existence rests on the government to give them the undue advantage.
If MAS must do the needy to cut down the number of vendors to make the company competitive, the government, which is many time bigger, and other GLCS, must do likewise. It would not be wrong to infer that Proton’s vendor programme is one factor behind its inability to compete, by requiring the company to source from local suppliers whose quality and prices are often less than satisfactory.
There is only so much “abuse” that the system can tolerate. I support affirmative action programmes but the trade-off with efficiency and value for money must be within limits. “Jobs” that have nothing to do with output are like transfer payments under a welfare programme. Vendor programmes without consideration of value for money is another form of transfer payments similar to a subsidy programme.
SEE ALSO:
Nufam: Mueller doesn’t understand M’sian work culture
T.K. Chua is an FMT reader.
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