A President, a Queen and two PMs
According to The Nut Graph HERE, studies by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development that reveal that Malaysia has the highest civil servants-to-population ratio in the Asia Pacific. Then, DAP national publicity secretary Tony Pua said Malaysia had a bloated civil service – Malaysia’s ratio was 4.68%, compared to Indonesia’s 1.79%, Korea’s 1.85% and Thailand’s 2.06% all of which have less than half our ratio.
Last week, MP Liew Chin Tong revealed in his blog HERE that the Prime Minister’s Department’s allocation for 2010 is a whopping RM12 billion, not RM4 billion as some people may have perceived it to be. That’s a lot of money! Like many Malaysians, I wondered why that department is NOT tightening the belt like what the rest of us are doing in the light of subsidy cuts and warnings of imminent bankruptcy by 2019.
Based on MP Liew’s blog, I have summarized a few astounding facts:
A. Staff size of the PMD
Year: 1981
PM: TDM
Staff size: 4,414 staff in the PMD
TWENTY YEARS LATER
Year: 2001
PM: TDM
Staff size: 9,673 ( this is an increase of 119.14% after TWENTY YEARS)
Year: 2003
PM: Badawi
Staff size: 21,045 in 2003 (this is an increase of 117.564% in TWO YEARS)
Year : 2009
PM: PM Najib Razak
Satff Size: 25,332 (this is an increase of 20.37% over 6 years)
Year 2010
PM: PM Najib
Staff size: 43,544 people (this is an increase of 71.893% in ONE YEAR!!!!)
After that mathematical exercise, I decided to compare the budgets of our PM with that of the US President , Singapore PM and the Queen of England.
I was quite amazed that the information is readily available in the net.