Broken promises and shattered dreams

Arif Bakhtiar

Back in GE 14, Pakatan ran on simple youth-friendly policies with firm promises to tackle youth unemployment, which included not only the production of at least 1 million new jobs of “high-quality” jobs by the end of their first term of government but to also reduce the amount of foreign workers in the country from 6 million to 2.5 million.

In the weeks running up to voting day, Syed Saddiq Abdul Rahman’s campaign team released a video that went viral on the daily grind of Malaysians in Singapore–where he implored 400,000 “kingmaker” Malaysian and Johorean voters that worked in the small island state to vote for Pakatan Harapan.

In return, he would instil and build a new vision that would have a place for all 400,000 voters back in Malaysia.

Nearly two years on, we have yet to see a glimpse of this new vision.

The third quarter of 2019 offered a disappointing 4.4% in GDP – with a meandering 4.6% for the rest of the year. This is paltry compared to the forecasts that our neighbours are seeing with Indonesia at 5%, 6% for the Philippines and 6.9% for Vietnam respectively.

The Malaysian ringgit continues to falter from its pre-GE14 high of RM 3.86 to the dollar with it only recovering to RM4.05 to the dollar after a dismal performance between RM4.11 to RM4.17 in 2019.

For the 400,000 “kingmakers” there seems to be little in the way of job creation policy or wage increases that would attract medium-high-skill jobs that nearly half of Malaysians employed in Singapore back home.

In fact, both the construction and ICT industries have warned of even more brain-drain because of a continuing wage-gap in their industries.

According to Woon Thai Hai of the National ICT Association of Malaysia (Pikom) back in May 2019, while the salary of entry-level graduates in the industry is satisfactory at about RM3,000, the gap between this and the salary of senior management personnel continues to be wide.

In Syed Saddiq’s case, he has worryingly focused on providing band-aid solutions to the youth employment problem. His preference for the gig-economy and entry-level TVET occupations do nothing to shift our economy from labour-intensive business model to another.

This flies in the face of our current National Automotive Policy (NAP) 2019 which will place a keen focus on automation to create “mobility as a service”. In such a scenario, won’t this affect the viability of current mobility-industries such as GoJek and Grab as an employment opportunity?

While Syed Saddiq is only one minister of many, and his portfolio does not directly handle the larger economic affairs of the PH government, the actions of his fellow ministers show that they are more or less OK with the status quo.

Look at the tiptoeing that our ministers do when organizations such as the MEF cry-wolf over policies such as the multi-tier foreign worker system or an increasing the minimum wage.

While our current labour-intensive economic model helped Malaysia emerge as a Tiger Cub in the previous century, the transition to a high-income economy requires a major shift from this.

Right now, the government desperately needs pull its socks up if it hopes to fulfil the vision of Malaysia Baru that it promised in GE14. They can flaunt mega-projects such as Third National Car Project, the rollout of 5G technology, and IR4.0 as magic bullets to our economic ails, but they need to be aware and learn from lessons that previous mega-projects such as Proton have showed us.

But more importantly, they need to rebuild the coalition that brought them to power in the first place and assure them they are at least trying to build the vision that promised us back in 2018, lest those same kingmakers rule against them in the next general election.