One of the most common Malaysian words I hear is “gomenshud”.
This is used whenever an issue of concern arises and the “government should” do something about it rather than the private sector or, heaven-forfend, that individuals should fix it for themselves.
It is ironic that people complain of incompetence, systemic corruption and moral turpitude within the executive, legislature, judiciary and the permanent civil service at federal and state levels but still demand that more money, responsibility and interference opportunities should be handed to them.
The economics of government and policy design, called “public choice theory” tells us clearly that people in government are not driven by the “greater good” or the “public interest”, they are, just like the rest of us, driven by personal and collective self-interest.
This is not meant to be cynical or offensive but simply to help us understand those in public policy as human beings — they have hopes and dreams, they want to make life easy for themselves as far as possible and if there is a chance to make a few bucks they will take it.
Each year the auditor-general reports hundreds of millions lost in wastage and leakages across the government sector. The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) estimates RM277 billion lost to corruption between 2018 and 2023. The think tank Emir Research estimates that RM4.5 trillion was lost to corruption in the last 26 years.
This is all identified after the fact and to stop this haemorrhage of resources we need to address the “gomenshud mentality” which defaults to intervention from the start without proper evaluation of the costs and benefits and the likely losses due specifically to policy design.
A common form of policy design in Malaysia is the “patronage cascade” where projects, concessions and access routes to money are specifically built-in to benefit middlemen often through pre-allocated packages and contracts.
With this in mind, the 13th Malaysia Plan which will be tabled this week should reduce the role and interference of government. We should be cautious if we see “patronage cascades” where policies are specifically designed to pass projects to vested interests.
Instead, broad-based universal programmes, available to everyone, with open and transparent access routes should be the emphasis.
This can be achieved first by government exiting commercial activities which crowd out large businesses, SMEs and micro enterprises and leaving these activities to the private sector.
Second by slashing regulations and focusing only on minimum standards of health and safety, anti-corruption, good governance and anti-trust issues.
Finally, by focusing on the basic role of government in many areas where there are direct and legitimate concerns for public policy including public health, education and social protection.
Economic mechanisms we hope to see in the 13MP include liberalisation of markets, reducing regulatory burdens, limiting government interference and promoting creative, innovative, agile, competitive businesses.
The US tariff issue also sends us a lesson that protectionist policies come with a reciprocal cost. So removing restrictions to market access should also be a priority for the 13MP.
Proper independent assessments have rarely been made of the targets of previous Malaysia plans and many have not been delivered, fully or at all.
The main unfulfilled target of every Malaysia plan is to build in a mechanism to end the need for future plans. In other words, these are “forever wars” against dreamed up economic challenges more typical of centrally planned economies.
They are increasingly irrelevant in a modern technology-driven economic environment in which anything laid down in July 2025 will be obsolete by December 2025 let alone by 2030 — gomenshud recognise this and end it once and for all.
The views expressed are the writer’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.