Of haircuts and Miti website crashes

It’s a good thing that this government, when it comes to controlling Covid-19, listens to our very competent and able Health director-general. If it doesn’t and if politicians take matters into their own hands, all the gods we pray to will not be able to help us from their crass stupidity and their need to control.

When the PM announced that the movement control order or MCO was extended to April 28, it did not come as a shock to us. We all expected it because we needed more time to tell if the measures taken were having an impact. Why, we did not even rush to the supermarkets.

And then came the announcement by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (Miti) after the PM’s announcement on Friday - hairdressers are among the list of essential services that could open! A more ridiculous move could not have been imagined. There are few things which have closer proximity than having your hair cut - the barber’s face is literally inches away from yours. Even if he has a mask on, it won’t save you.

Barbers had more sense than Miti and many refused to open. If a barber cuts 20 heads a day and one of them infects him with Covid-19, it’s a pretty good chance he will give a viral overload to all his other customers. Before he is discovered to have Covid-19 himself, say 15 days later, he would infect some 300 people. Which is why the Health DG was aghast - won’t you and I be too? But strangely, why not Miti?

After tabligh-style gatherings, few things can be more potent than a barbershop with an infected hairdresser. Multiply that by a few thousand and what do you have in your hands? An unmitigated disaster. How could Miti not have seen this? Surely they have better brains than that there? Or were the brains in the form of able civil servants simply sidelined there?

This is no small matter. As this article was being written, it was announced that Putrajaya has retracted the exemptions for businesses providing haircuts or optometry services. Good sense has prevailed.

Online applications

And then there is this list of businesses which are permitted to restart operations because they, like cutting hair, are considered essential services. Alright, the list is OK - how wrong can you go with what you consider essential services? Okay, okay, there was this anomaly over beer companies which overnight were declassified from beverage to I don’t know what although soft drinks laden with sugar were still considered a beverage and somehow essential.

But moving on from there, Miti wanted every single operator in its new list of essential services which will be permitted to operate to get prior permission, I repeat prior permission, from Miti before they could operate. They have to apply online. How preposterous!

These are rough, tough times, these are registered businesses, what’s wrong with just letting them resume operations - they were operating before, right? Simply let them start operating again but with conditions to ensure distancing and precautions to prevent infection.

And where are these precautions? Have standard operating procedures been set for this? These are more important to do than approving applications. There are a million businesses in Malaysia - can Miti handle all those in a couple of days? Of course not. Why this need for control and approvals?

You and I can figure out what would happen if a million businesses are required to make online applications. If you don’t provide for it, the system will crash. Indeed it did and Miti had to suspend application procedures yesterday. It claimed there were 176,000 applications but probably many times more could not even get into the website.

We don’t have to be geniuses to make better suggestions to Miti. Basically, no need to apply. Tell businesses to be prepared to reopen in one week and show them a draft of SOPs - that’s standard operating procedures - to be adhered to, inviting feedback. If you meet the SOPs, you can reopen but the government will check on you.

By the way, before you do even this, get a multidisciplinary body composed of senior government servants (not politicians) to sort things out. Include health officials, the police, army, legal, and others to thrash through the procedures. Then come out with SOPs which will allow the businesses to reopen.

Really, that’s common sense, right? Why so difficult?

Ramadan bazaars

Meantime, while one minister at Miti shows ignorance and lack of grey matter and consultation, another is dead set on Ramadan bazaars, even offering drive-through ones at various sites in Kuala Lumpur. Should this misguided minister be doing this? Has he talked to the health authorities?

I strongly suspect that this minister has not gone to a Ramadan bazaar or if he has, he had an escort which parted the foot traffic for him. It’s a shoulder-to-shoulder affair and an intensely physical one where people are often not more than a foot apart from each other.

Before he makes a fool of himself, I ask this minister to consider how he is going to control traffic in cars going to these bazaars. How do you drive from stall to stall when it is tough even by foot? I can tell him it will be a flop without doing any feasibility study - some ideas are so dumb they don’t deserve that. More reasonable propositions are pre-orders and using delivery services.

I really, really wish our backdoor ministers postpone their ambitions to exert the power in their hands to do things and instead seek the counsel of experienced and knowledgeable civil servants in their ministries before opening their mouths and coming up with ridiculous suggestions. It would not only save money but human lives in the current dire environment.

Finally, the numbers show that there are 13 million people in the B40 sector. The government is giving a cash payment of RM1,000 this month for a household of say, five and a further RM600 next month.

How are these people going to make ends meet when they have no savings and can’t operate their own daily businesses like Makcik Kiah, the famous goreng pisang seller? Millions of them out there won’t have earned a sen during the one and half month MCO. How are they going to avoid starvation and extreme malnutrition?

Surely they deserve more help than what this government is giving. Why can’t these politicians focus on these things and use their influence to ensure more money is allocated to the really needy? At least they will be making themselves useful.

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P GUNASEGARAM is editor of Focus Malaysia. He believes the greater the crisis, the less politicians should handle it, leaving it to the professionals instead. - Mkini