Tenth Malaysia Plan: Long live NEP – RIP NEM
Lim Kit Siang
The signature theme of Datuk Seri Najib Razak on his accession as Prime Minister in April last year was the national transformation of Malaysia, which is anchored on four critical pillars:
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1st pillar: “1Malaysia, People First, Performance Now” concept to unite Malaysians.
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2nd pillar: the Government Transformation Programme (GTP) to deliver the outcomes defined under the National Key Result Areas (NKRAs).
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3rd pillar: the New Economic Model (NEM) resulting from the ambitious Economic Transformation Programme (ETP) to transform Malaysia by 2020 into a developed, competitive and high income economy with inclusivity and sustainability.
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4th pillar; the 10th Malaysia Plan 2011-2015 as the first policy operationalisation of both the government and economic transformation programme.
The Prime Minister unveiled the New Economic Model on 30th March and presented the Tenth Malaysia Plan in Parliament on 10th June. A sea-change took place in the intervening two months, with Najib retreating from his national transformation programme when he succumbed to pressures from extremist groups making baseless and incendiary claims such as that the Malays are under siege and that the Chinese would take over the economy and country.
As a result, instead of the first policy operationalisation of the NEM, the Tenth Malaysia Plan is a funeral requiem for the NEM.
The NEM admission that “the excessive focus on ethnicity-based distribution of resources has contributed to growing separateness and dissension” is completely absent in the Prime Minister’s presentation of the Tenth Malaysia Plan.
This prepared the way for the Tenth Malaysia Plan’s abandonment of the most important of the eight Strategic Reform Initiative (SRI) described as “fundamental to achieving the NEM – on “Transparent and market-friendly affirmative action”.
As stated in Chapter 6 of NEM (p. 117):
“Existing affirmative action programme and institutions will continue in NEM but, in line with views of the main stakeholders, will be revamped to remove the rent seeking and market distorting features which have blemished the effectiveness of the programme. Affirmative action will consider all ethnic groups fairly and equally as long as they are in the low income 40% of the households. Affirmative action action programmes would be based on market-friendly and market-based criteria together taking into consideration the need and merits of the applicants. An Equal Opportunities Commission will be established to ensure fairness and address undue discrimination when occasional abuses by dominant groups are encountered.”
The promises of the NEM of a needs-and-merit based transformation of the affirmative programme, to promote building of capacity and capability, which will mean a dismanting of ethnic quotas, preferences, APs, closed tenders and other non-competitive processes, were very short-lived – all because of failure of political will and leadership.
I call on the Prime Minister, all MPs and all stakeholders in the country to revisit the warning of NEM on the dire consequences of failure of political will and leadership to carry out far-reaching national political, economic, social and government transformation.
As Chapter 7 of NEM warned: “The time for change is now – Malaysia deserves no less.”
The NEM rightly identified the most important enablers of the NEM are political will and leadership to break the log-jam of resistance by vested interest groups and preparing the rakyat to support deep-seated changes in policy directions.
It called for political will and leadership to put emphasis on coherent explanation of the vision and agenda of the NEM and transformation process and “to put in place a critical mass of bold measures” to “create an unstoppable wave of support from all segments of society for this vision”.
It warned:
“The government must take prompt action when resistance is encountered and stay the course”.
This is where the Najib administration has failed for when it faced resistance to the NEM proposals, it failed to stay the course.
Cabinet Ministers should explain why they fail to ensure that the NEM is adopted as official policy if the government is serious that it should be the third critical pillar of the far-reaching national transformation programme?
As it is, the message of the Tenth Malaysia Plan is – Long live NEP. Rest in Peace (RIP) NEM!
In fact, the lack of the political will and leadership to defend the NEP and to stay the course when encountering any resistance is manifestly clear when the Bahasa Malaysia version of the NEM is still not available online up to now. In fact, is there a Bahasa Malaysia version of the full NEM report?
When the NEM was unveiled just some two months ago, the country was warned of the dire consequences of the failure to undertake a major economic transformation.
The NEM said:
“Our shortcoming are preventing us from getting out of the middle income trap. Almost all economies of South East Asia are poised to achieve high economic growth in this decade. But Malaysia runs the imminent risk of a downward spiral and faces the painful possibility of stagnation.”
The NEM warning and the sense of urgency that “There is a serious risk that the economy may regress if fundamental changes are not made” is still to be discerned in the introductory chapter of the Tenth Malaysia Plan when it was distributed under embargo to MPs on the first day of the present meeting of Parliament on 7th June 2009.
It stressed: “We need to see the reality for what it is: we are on a burning platform.”
But this dire warning that Malaysia is on “a burning platform” was conspicuously omitted in the Bahasa Malaysia version of the Tenth Malaysia Plan and by the time of Najib’s presentation of the Tenth Malaysia Plan speech, the sense of urgency that Malaysia has no choice but to opt for a New Economic Model has disappeared.
