Budget looms, but where is the ombudsman?

Come October 27, there will be yet another budget that will determine how billions of ringgit will be spent in 2018.

Whether the money will be used productively to bring the country forward, or spiral into a black hole depends on how the budget is designed.

With the election coming, we are “confident” of one thing. There will be a lot more excitement in the air, when Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak, who is also Finance Minister, starts throwing all sorts of goodies around.

Soon, people will forget about the goods and services tax (GST), because they have their BR1M money to spend again. Even with a RM2,400 salary, it is a lot of money to have an extra RM400, but for the rich, this is equivalent to just a few meals for one in a posh restaurant. For the poor, it is not even enough for a month’s groceries.

BR1M is like throwing crumbs. Malaysians have short memories. They will forget about the hardships that they have gone through when they have the BR1M money in their pockets.

Numbers that don’t add up

With all the promises, some 1.6 million civil servants will also get to enjoy another big pay raise and there will be fat bonuses too. The pensioners will also get some crumbs to make them happy.

They should take whatever they can take when it is given, but their gratefulness should be to the people whose money that has actually come from.

At the end of the day, civil servants should realise that their loyalty is to the Yang di-Pertuan Agong but in a democratic nation, the government of the day can be changed for the better.

At the rate that we are going, the civil service in Malaysia is already running at the cost RM150 billion of taxpayer’s money every year.

We cannot expect to have a better civil service compared to Singapore, especially when, according to Finance Minister II Johari Ghani (photo), we have one of the highest ratios of civil service to population in the world with one civil servant to 19.37 people compared to Singapore’s ratio of 1:71.4 people.

Is this something that all Malaysians should be proud of? If not, we should compare ourselves to a small nation like Singapore which has a GDP of US$297 billion while ours was US$296.8 billion in the same year (2016). For that, we hear Najib telling us that the Malaysian economy is indeed doing very well in 2017.

Not forgetting Thailand’s GDP is already US$406.8 billion in the same year (2016). Forty years ago, the gap was very small between all three countries.

We are slated to become a developed nation by 2020. How not to be happy with Umno and Barisan Nasional’s great leadership all these years?

Why the delay?

What is most curious is we are still talking about the need for an ombudsman, instead of having one already in place.

What happened to all the big fat promises made in past years? Did the government manage to deliver as promised?

When documents are stamped Official Secrets Act (OSA), no one will know for sure what happened to the additional money given to a particular ministry.

If the nation’s leaders are truly interested in being transparent, they should set up the ombudsman immediately to look into all the budget issues to see if the government delivers what it promised.

I am sure there will be a lot of gaps. Even when the auditor-general's office managed to detect certain wastages, who is there to oversee and make sure that this does not repeat the following year?

What I do know, however, is that in hospitals, there is not enough medicine. Certain reagents are still not available to carry out blood tests.

I am with Ijok state assemblyman, Dr Idris Ahmad who wrote asking why the Malaysian government is setting up a field hospital in Bangladesh when it is not fulfilling its obligations to its own people.

He gave the example of Pendang in Kedah, where Najib had listed the Pendang district hospital in his 2016 budget speech as among those to be built.

“Unfortunately to this day, what was promised by the Umno-BN government has yet to materialise.

"The Pendang hospital was approved under the Ninth Malaysian Plan with an area of 16.8 hectares, but was postponed to the Tenth Malaysian Plan for certain reasons, and to this day the Pendang Hospital has yet to be implemented although the government had decided to build it under the 11th Malaysian Plan.”

We are getting nowhere without the ombudsman.

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STEPHEN NG is an ordinary citizen with an avid interest in following political developments in the country since 2008.- Mkini