The 11MP’s ominous chapter on public service

The 11^th Malaysia Plan (11MP) will impact every branch of the public service, every business and every person. Is the future as promising as the 11MP implies?

The key outcomes of the 11MP are stated in the second paragraph on the first page:

“In the last five years, although Malaysia encountered headwinds from a global economic slowdown, our economy has done extremely well with GDP growth among the fastest in the region. The quality of life of the rakyat have (sic) also improved as reflected by the increase in both per capita income and the average household income” (page i).

From a people perspective, the average household income is one of the key outputs of interest. The main factor influencing household income is income from employment.

A table in Appendix A5-2 provides an overview of employment. It is remarkable that this Appendix is not mentioned in the body of the 11MP.

The table, titled “Labour force, employment and job creation, 2010-2020,” indicates a 2015 labour force of 14.2 million persons, comprising 13.8 million employed persons and 400,000 unemployed persons. It does not indicate how many are employed in the public (government) service.

The Government is a key employer in our nation. The 10MP introduced the Government Transformation Program as a remedy for under performance in the public service. In the 11MP, chapter nine (of ten) is titled “Transforming public service for productivity.”

It begins by highlighting ten achievements of the 10MP (page 9-4). Several of the highlights look like dubious claims; I will discuss only 2 of them.

First, I will touch on what is unsaid in the last highlight: “613,743 public servants benefited from improved career advancement schemes.”

How many public servants are there?

Since there is a whole chapter devoted to transforming public service for productivity, it is remarkable that the plan does not include the number of employees in the public service, does not include the trend over the 10MP and does not include a projection for the 11MP.

I find the omission of the number of employees in the public service particularly odd since there have been many claims of a bloated public service in Malaysia.

In January 2014,  Datuk Seri Idris Jala of Pemandu said there were 1.4 million employees in the public service. He used the figure while countering the argument of some critics that the Malaysian public service is bloated compared to the United Kingdom. He made the point – justifiably – that those who work for the National Health Service in the UK are not counted as public service employees, whereas Malaysia counts all who work in the public health service as public service employees. (Idris also made another comparison with Australia which showed the Malaysian public service favorably.)

So, from a year ago and from five years ago, there were good reasons to probe and improve the public service.

The probing has been done, actions were attempted in the 10MP and a whole chapter in the 11MP has been devoted to making further changes in the public service to improve productivity. This is worthy of praise. But why is the data for number of employees in the public service missing? Does anyone believe the omission of the data was not deliberate?

Now I’ll discuss another highlight, another “achievement” the 11MP claims for the 10MP.

Have you ever heard of 1MOCC, “1Malaysia One Call Centre”? Not only is 1MOCC one of the ten highlights, it even has a boxed article dedicated to it (page 9-7). The boxed article includes this:

“[1MOCC includes] +60 3 8000 8000 as a unique single contact number to connect to all government agencies . . .  [and] 24/7 operation including Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays.

“[1MOCC] . . . has resulted in optimization of resources and more effective collaboration between ministries and agencies in providing services to the public. 1MOCC received the 2013 Service Innovation Award by FuturGov Asia Pacific, and the 2014 Best Government Centre Award by Avaya Malaysia.”

It is remarkable that our government takes pride in awards given by private organizations who are service providers. Are we supposed to be impressed by awards given by vendors? [Yes, we are more interested in whether the job was awarded by open tender.]

The 11MP claims 1MOCC handled 3.1 million transactions from November 2012 to April 2015. That sounds impressive until you do the arithmetic and find that it amounts to a mere 100,000 transactions per month, and you notice there is no cost/benefit analysis: there is neither information about where cost was reduced, nor information about the cost of operating the system.

So, personal incomes are going to be mightily affected by the 11MP. Why is crucial data missing? Why are dubious claims made? Do you think incomes are going to be impacted positively? – June 11, 2015.

* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insider.