Budget 2012: Tale of a bloated bureaucracy and half-truths

It's old wine in a new bottle and the operating expenditures, at nearly 80%, will gobble up the overwhelming bulk of the national budget

ANALYSIS

The Budget 2012 announced by Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak is no different from the one for this year. Development gets comparatively a measly RM50 billion while operating expenditures, at nearly 80%, will gobble up the overwhelming bulk of the national budget.

Yet few have commented so far on this “Harapkan Pagar, Pagar Makan Padi” budget. Najib trumpeted that the budget was the collective effort of many brilliant minds, including PhDs, diligently at work within the government.

He pooh-poohed claims by the opposition alliance that it was a copy-cat job based on their own version. The opposition, at the same time, said the budget was unrealistic.Najib rightly gloated over the opposition putting its foot in the mouth.We haven’t heard the last of this.

Najib, however, couldn’t get the PhDs to explain why the RM50 billion allocated for this year’s development targets is a measly sum by comparison with that allocated for those charged with supervising this so-called development.

The projects started so far this year face cost-overruns. This has resulted in either the scrapping or carrying forward of a good percentage of the projects planned for 2011. This makes 2012 old wine in a new bottle.

It has become almost routine for government development projects to finally cost the tax-payers double, triple and even up to 10 times the initially approved allocation. Old habits die hard as evident from the politics of patronage, far from being in its death throes, still taking centre-stage in Umno.

The proverbial “getting caught with the hand in the cookie jar” syndrome continues unabated as if there will be no tomorrow. How will all this translate into the national debt burden and the value of the currency in the years ahead? It remains to be seen.

However, if we look around, we don’t have to look too far in the global village ushered in by the digital economy brought about by globalisation and the information and communication technology.

The continuing tragedy of Greece comes to mind. The Mediterranean nation, run by a bloated bureaucracy as in Malaysia, has become more than insolvent and muddles through from day-to-day largely on international charity.

The mother of all cover-ups in the Budget 1012 is the increasing toll that the bloated bureaucracy, already 1.3 million strong, is exacting on the nation’s increasingly precarious finances.

‘The ight evils bedeviling Malaysia’

At one time, not so long ago, the government decided that the then one million strong civil service needed to be trimmed and embarked on an aggressive round of corporatisation and privatisations.

This brought down the number of civil servants to 800,000 but not for long. The figures were soon on the ri se again and surged past 1.2 million with the government not even batting an eyelid. Babudom had won hands down against their political masters.

Wither all the corporatisation and privatisation exercises! The Babus themselves had dutifully worked on the twin strategies - amidst much breast-beating, wailing, moaning and groaning – at the behest of their political masters.

It appears that the right hand did not know what the left hand was doing. The latter was getting the government to be even more firmly entrenched in the business of being in business. The former, meanwhile, was getting it out and away on the premise that “the government has no business being in business”.

Alas the Babus enmeshed in the world of red tape quickly negated whatever benefits the nation could have drawn from corporatisation and privatisation. Now, we no longer hear any talk about corporatisation and privatisation and the need to trim the civil service to a more financially manageable limit.

Malaysia does not need a civil service which exceeds 500,000, a magical figure based on merit and productivity. Alas, it will not be, given the gutless wonders in public office.

Patently, the eight evils bedeviling Malaysia’s national budget every year are the permanent dole system that the civil service has since become, the welfare state system enjoyed by a privileged few from womb to tomb, the subsidy syndrome, the dependency syndrome fostered on the rural people by a ruling party eyeing a captive vote bank, the politics of patronage, the Licence Raj, the system of government procurements, tenders, contracts, concessions, licences, quotas and permits, and the underhand practice of padding the electoral rolls in marginal seats – think slush funds – with illegal immigrants.

It’s unthinkable for Umno in particular to introduce the kind of reforms that will downsize the civil service and free the work force for the private sector. The party isn’t likely to do away either with the other crippling practices that reduced the nation’s economy last year end to one size smaller than that of neighbouring Singapore.

Some measure of the national budget not telling the whole story in Malaysia can be gleaned from four recent and not so recent developments.

For one, neighbouring Thailand has announced that the country will introduce a nationwide minimum wage of RM900 per month. Malaysia has yet to do so and is thinking of a much lower figure sector by sector.

India, in a “take it or leave it” stance, will not allow its nationals to work as domestic help in Malaysia unless they are paid at least RM1,400 per month. That was enough to send many potential Malaysian employers up the wall.

Adding insult to injury, Cambodia declared last night (Oct 14, 2011) that it will join Indonesia and no longer allow its nationals to work as domestic help in Malaysia.