For the past 30 years, the government has come up with a large number of ambitious plans but many have ended up as nothing but empty talk because details have been overlooked.
COMMENT
By Lim Sue Goan
Although the Road Transport Department (JPJ) claims it is doing its job every day, it had failed to stop an express bus with some 43 outstanding traffic summonses over three years from being taken off the road, resulting in the death of 14 passengers in a dreadful accident on Christmas Eve.
Although they are doing their work every day, it is more important that they be firm in enforcement, efficiency and accuracy. A lapse in attitude will give rise to serious tragedies.
There is no doubt that our government has placed a lot of emphasis on road safety. Because of that, we have a number of units tasked with ensuring road safety for motorists, including JPJ, traffic police and the Land Public Transport Commission (SPAD), among others.
However, these units are under the jurisdiction of different government departments and ministries, and hence overlapping in their job duties and consequently, resulting in the inevitable loopholes.
It is normal for the government to introduce measures to control express bus operations after a serious accident has taken place. No exception for the latest incident.
The traffic police have set up a task force to conduct random checks on express bus and transportation companies with large numbers of outstanding traffic summonses. But how long can such an operation last?
Many government departments have been computerised but why can’t these departments be linked? The traffic police should be able to provide the traffic offence particulars to the JPJ, which should then immediately block the offenders from renewing their permits and road taxes, while SPAD should suspend the operating licence of the companies concerned.
Negligence is the main course of lax enforcement. For example, construction site accidents have been occurring regularly in the Klang Valley, resulting in the death of workers and road users because the authorities have not been seriously looking into every detail of the incidents, including whether the crane operators are suitably qualified or whether the machines are outdated.
Second Finance Minister Johari Abdul Ghani said 3.3 billion tax-free cigarettes and 2,200 liters of tax-free liquor had gone missing, resulting in the government losing about RM5.28 billion in tax revenue. The thing is, do the authorities check every smuggling channel carefully?
For the past 30 years, the government has come up with a large number of ambitious plans but because the details have been overlooked, many of these plans have ended up as nothing but empty talk.
Back when I was a reporter, the government under Dr Mahathir Mohamad proposed the “zero inflation” plan to control goods prices so that Malaysians could have a comfortable life. We all know this is long behind us now.
The government also set a 2015 drug-free target, but today, the Thai police claim that Penang has become a major transit point for drugs from the Golden Triangle.
We had a bagful of other major projects during Mahathir’s time, such as the Multimedia Super Corridor which was indeed a very grand vision. Unfortunately, Malaysians have remained laggards in innovativeness as evidenced by the country’s latest Global Innovation Index ranking falling to 35th position.
We used to take pride in our national cars back in mid-1980s, but somehow we missed out on some of the technical details, such as faulty windows that have since affected the national car maker’s reputation.
Similarly, the residents of Kuala Lumpur were very excited when our LRT and monorail services commenced. Unfortunately, there was an absence of seamless connectivity with other modes of public transport because they were run by different companies.
Obviously, there was no proper planning prior to the construction of these different rail networks in and around the city.
Despite the impressive education reforms in place from during Mahathir’s time all the way to the education blueprint today, Malaysian students’ performance in international evaluations has been lacklustre and our education standard remains pathetic.
In addition, flood mitigation has also been planned and discussed for decades but if it pours, all our flood mitigation solutions are rendered powerless.
With only three years to go, no one can guarantee that we are able to achieve our goal of a high-income country by 2020. But then the government has come up with the new TN50 without identifying our weaknesses.
All these years we have been pursuing unrealistically impressive growth figures at the expense of the details in implementation. As a consequence, we have wasted a lot of precious time and resources.
We won’t be going anywhere if the details are not taken care of, as the devil is in the details.
Lim Sue Goan writes for Sin Chew Daily.
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