What is it about the youth and sports minister that makes him heavy with buzzwords and light on concrete sport strategies? What is it about the ministry that makes it so limp?
Ideas on safety nets for athletes and on salvaging Malaysian sport are as rare as hen’s teeth.
Sporting circles are fed up to the back teeth with the ministry’s constant lament that there is little money for sport. The under-fire ministry does not offer a practical solution, refuses to accept reality, fails to harness the power of sport, and creates more outrage.
Even as there is extreme anxiety ahead of the Commonwealth Games, Asian Games, and the SEA Games this year, minister Ahmad Faizal Azumu and his pack have abandoned about 150 full-time national athletes.
That was done on the basis of a lower federal budget allocation for sport in light of the Covid-19 pandemic and the recent floods.
The athletes have either been abruptly dropped from programmes by National Sports Council or slapped with drastic cuts in their monthly allowances.
National 110m hurdler Rayzam Shah Wan Sofian, once Asia’s No 2, was heartbroken when his monthly allowance was suddenly reduced from RM2,000 to RM800. He said McDonald’s pays higher.
Rayzam, who turns 34 today, has never had a full-time job. He became a national athlete at 19. He has no savings in the Employees’ Provident Fund and is now practically another worker in a gig economy.
Former world No 5 squash player Low Wee Wern and nine others under the Squash Racquets Association of Malaysia’s full-time programme were dumped at short notice.
It followed the NSC’s move to downsize the number of full-time athletes under its charge from 432 to 288 due to budget cuts although the 10 players still have much to contribute to the sport and country.
Wee Wern, who turned professional after rejecting offers from US Ivy League universities such as Harvard and Princeton, said she felt used and then tossed away.
Such uncertainty has got parents to rethink a career in sport for their children as it would be a great risk to delay further education and other opportunities.
Many criticised a broken funding model, bemoaning “we wonder why” Malaysia is struggling in sport.
Events have shattered their belief that sport in Malaysia is as important as education and health and is integral to the development of individuals.
They cast doubt over the government’s pledge to deliver national pride and inspiration through international sporting success.
Can’t sportspeople stand on their own two feet? Medals cost money. Breeding champions is costly. Glory is not cheap.
For decades, national sports associations have relied on the NSC, the funding arm of the ministry, to prepare athletes for major competitions and to initiate programmes.
It was different in the 1980s and 90s when banks employed promising athletes and produced about 70% of the national track and field stars. The inter-bank championships were a regular fixture in the domestic calendar and athletes maintained flexibility in terms of their working-training schedule.
Now, with no further investments in sport, the ministry should seek a stronger partnership with voluntary grassroots sports clubs to keep the production line of fresh young athletes running.
As these clubs are doing much to build a sporting culture at grassroots level, the government should consider granting them charitable status, exempting them from paying some form of tax.
Scrapping the NSC’s six-year-old podium programme and reducing the number of athletes in its full-time programmes, all due to spending cuts, was the easy way out.
Many of the issues could have been avoided had the 16 sports ministers over the past four decades increased sport’s significance in the decision-making process and pushed it further up the political agenda.
It didn’t help that sport was not high on the priorities of previous governments, and still isn’t.
Further, sport has not generally been taken seriously in Parliament where there has been minimum parliamentary scrutiny and rarely any extensive debates on sport.
That’s why the National Sports Vision 2030 has never been debated in Parliament. The so-called blueprint looks destined to be binned.
Caught in this quagmire, Malaysian sport needs a huge disruption in the form of a ministry dedicated to sports. A standalone ministry will stand true to the values and ideals of sport and have the resolve to explore its proper potential.
The current youth and sports portfolio sees the minister performing too many duties outside of sport and therefore not able to give sufficient time to it.
We say we value sport, but we have never taken the trouble, formally, to treat it as a distinct activity with inherent values, as many other countries have.
Will that happen considering the vested interests of politicians who feed off sport?
What would our country be like without sports and local champions? We are about to find out and it might just be a horror show. - FMT
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.
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