PKR deputy president Nurul Izzah Anwar has urged Putrajaya to reassess the country's "overly complex" migrant workers management systems.
In an opinion piece, she highlighted how Malaysia’s foreign worker recruitment process has, over time, accumulated unnecessary tiers that now involve "so many layers of private contractors" to manage the systems.
"Intermediaries have multiplied, costs have risen, and responsibility has diffused. What remains is a structure that appears increasingly detached from its original purpose.
"It is tempting to frame this purely in economic terms. We speak urgently about the volume of remittances leaving Malaysia, yet numbers can obscure as much as they reveal.
"The more difficult question is how the system governing this flow came to be structured in the first place, and whether that structure still serves the national interest," Nurul Izzah (above) said in her article, which The Star published this morning.
She added that despite the reforms the government has undertaken and its declarations of efficiency, the process surrounding migrant labour has remained "stubbornly opaque".
This has resulted in other more immediate issues, including recruitment debts, contract discrepancies and the quiet vulnerability that accompanies dependence on opaque systems, the former Permatang Pauh MP pointed out.
"The operational framework of providers such as Bestinet has been a matter of public record for years, including during proceedings of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) when I was in Parliament.
"Those sessions reflected an awareness, even then, that the system warranted closer examination.
"Recent legal actions involving individuals connected to this ecosystem should not be read as isolated disruptions.
"They are indications of structural strain. Systems that are overly complex, insufficiently transparent or disproportionately extractive will eventually reveal their weaknesses," Nurul Izzah said.
Bestinet’s role
Bestinet is a Bangladesh migrant recruitment company that created the Foreign Worker Centralised Management System (FWCMS) system, which Malaysia adopted in 2015, and the Anwar Ibrahim-led government continued in 2024 despite criticisms.
Putrajaya's adoption of the system in 2015 also came with another arrangement that forced Bangladesh to route its workers through only 10 out of the country's over 1,000 agencies.
The company was implicated in a recent Bloomberg report about the plight of Bangladeshi workers, who had to borrow a hefty amount of money so they could pay an alleged "syndicate fee" to work in Malaysia. It attributed this to the FWCMS.
Bestinet and its founder Aminul Islam Abdul Nor have since denied the allegations and filed a civil suit against 10 media outlets and individuals, including Bloomberg and Malaysiakini.
Walk the talk
In her article, Nurul Izzah, who is Anwar’s daughter, called for the government to walk the talk in its commitment to good governance.
She said the appropriate response by the government when a system is perceived as "opaque or misaligned" is to conduct a reassessment instead of being defensive.
"This is not an exercise in blame, nor an invitation to relitigate the past. It is a call for closure where closure is due – a call to ensure that our systems are not merely efficient, but just.
"Leadership is not measured by the avoidance of difficult questions, but by the willingness to confront them directly, even when the answers resist comfort," Nurul Izzah said. - Mkini
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