WHEN it comes to measuring performance of a country, everyone becomes an expert. Data entities, non-governmental organisations, consultants and such like bodies and individuals put the country under the microscope when the first 100 days, anniversary or other made-up milestones arrive.
Even organisations from oceans apart proffer their eyeshot from a distorted distance. Such was the case when Malaysia Baru turned one on Thursday. There is no harm in being examined this way. After all, these are ways of seeing. Perspectives sometimes lend a better view. Improvements, at bottom, are made of this.
But there is yet a better route to improvements: self-correction. Like Malaya self-governed after Merdeka on Aug 31, 1957, Malaysia Baru must self-correct. But for the government to do so, there must be measurement and monitoring. Listening to mere rants of others won’t do the country any good. It is a universal truth that human beings — and institutions, too — adjust their behaviours according to metrics. But those who are given the task to develop the metrics must get it right. Otherwise, it would be a return of the Performance Management and Delivery Unit (Pemandu) empire that sold their narrative of illusions by PowerPoints. What looked good on slides wasn’t as good where the rubber met the road. Take the case of Pemandu’s PowerPoint story of pride. Malaysia, with its economic and government transformation programme in full swing in 2017, was on course to being a high-income nation by 2020.
Much ink was spilt at conferences and seminars hawking such aspirational narratives. Some media too were complicit in giving space to such portrayals. In the meanwhile, graduates were idling without jobs for at least six months after convocation. And those who were fortunate enough to find work earned less than RM2,000 per month. But not many stopped to ask: How could a nation pretend to head towards high-income when people with degrees were earning third-world salaries?
Pemandu sold their narratives through PowerPoints, but the Microsoft presentation programme’s busy bar charts can often be deceiving. Small wonder PowerPoint thinking was implicated in two Nasa space shuttle disasters and banned in Iraq by the United States army. Those who have seen Pemandu’s slides know exactly why PowerPoint thinking has such detrimental effect. The New Straits Times is all for a monitoring agency, but the government must ensure that no Pemandu-like body springs up hydra-like. We do not want a billion ringgit blunder again.
There is a lot going for Malaysia Baru, a new administration that aspires to run the government on principles of accountability, integrity and caring for people. Such a model is best placed to bring shared prosperity to a multiracial country like Malaysia. But the road to shared prosperity is paved with uneven cobblestones. There are disparities that must be recognised. Next, the root causes of such inequalities must be eliminated. Such elimination must be blind to race, economic class or geographic location. The journey may be long and arduous. But the shared prosperity trek must be taken. Should we stumble and fall, we must self-correct.