The Tangled Mess of 68 Ministers and Deputies

 

How can our government not turn into a circus of chaos when the Prime Minister alone juggles “more than 28 Cabinet committees”? There are so many Cabinet committees that even Deputy Education Minister Datuk Dr Wee Ka Siong had to admit that he can’t count them all.

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The more the messier. Researchers have found that performance of national governments declines as Cabinets grow larger. Parkinson of Parkinson’s Law fame noted that it is critical for Cabinets to have less than 21 ministers if decision-making is to be efficient.

Our government shamelessly defies the ‘law’ with a whopping 30 ministers and 38 deputies. We ordinary citizens pay the price for its ‘disobedience’. A recent example is the AES (Automated Enforcement System) fiasco. The Transport Ministry installed cameras to catch speedsters on the road. Quite incredibly, though, it had obviously not consulted the Home Ministry, because the traffic cops said they would continue to run their own speed-trap operations, including at locations near the AES cameras. An even bigger farce broke out when the Attorney-General ended up freezing AES summons trials due to questions on its legality. When government ministers and agencies collide, more taxpayers’ funds would have to be wasted to sort out the disarray.

How can our government not turn into a circus of chaos when the Prime Minister alone juggles “more than 28 Cabinet committees”? There are so many Cabinet committees that even Deputy Education Minister Datuk Dr Wee Ka Siong had to admit that he can’t count them all. And the Cabinet mess is such that even a simple matter like traffic enforcement gets jammed.

There is hope for us if the government slims down. Read Cabinet and Parliamentary Rebalancing (Part 2): The tangled mass of 68 Ministers and Deputies on how our bloated Cabinet can be trimmed to a svelte 16 ministries and 18 ministers, in order to facilitate communication and cross-disciplinary cooperation for the benefit of Malaysians.