JANUARY 31 — When I drove past Bangi along the North South Highway recently, I slowed down as I remembered there was an AES camera installed there. Some other vehicles, nevertheless, did not seem to bother about the AES and just whizzed past me on the fast lane.
The Black Knight has been paralysed, the speeding tickets issued invalidated. Save for law-abiding citizens who are afraid to receive a traffic ticket, many just would not care the least.
Another failed outsourced project by the Malaysian government.
By outsourcing some of the jobs to the private sector, the government can save on costing and can bypass the perennial issue of poor civil service efficiency while expecting some fixed income.
Both the government and the outsourced contractors are the winning lot. As a result, anything that can be outsourced — projects, consultancy and PR services — have all been outsourced.
The thing is, if both the government and the contractors are making money from the outsourcing exercise, then who should foot the bill?
Naturally the powerless rakyat.
AES' failure could be attributed to the lack of surveillance from the government, ambiguous enforcement power, lack of transparency in outsourcing contracts and profit-sharing between the government and the private sector.
While the AES project could have been conceived with a kind intention of effectively reducing traffic incidents, but it was unable to win the trust of the public and had to be aborted.
Which does not come as a surprise to me. But what really comes as a surprise is the the government does not seem to have learned a lesson from it.
I was talking about the MyEG online renewal of foreign workers' permits and Bestinet's Foreign Workers Centralized Management System (FWCMS).
MyEG now accepts only online renewal for foreign workers' permits, charging RM38 for each transaction. With an estimated of two million foreign workers in the country, the company can look forward to RM76 million in revenue each year.
Bestinet's FWCMS, meanwhile, will be handling the visas for foreign workers, charging RM250 each, way higher than the original fee of only RM15.
Earlier on, the government has outsourced the foreign worker health screening to Fomema, which charges RM180 for check-up services that used to cost only about RM60.
Another prominent outsourcing project has been the much criticised Puspakom.
Indeed, the jobs have been outsourced, prices increased, both private companies and the government making good money. But, people in the street have to dig deeper into their pockets for services that are not necessarily improved.
In other words, the outsourcing exercise has been carried out at the expense of the people's interests.
Moreover, the outsourcing procedures are not transparent. It remains questionable whether open tenders have been carried out, whether the costs have been reasonable and fairly vetted.
Looking that the current trend, it is natural that more government duties will be outsourced in the future. Beginning with the foreign workers, if they get married and have their kids here some day and if they were to apply for Malaysian citizenships, all; these can always be handled by companies specifically established for such purposes.
Next, outsourced operations will be extended to Malaysian citizens. Outsourced companies will handle everything from birth registration, MyKad issuance, university degrees, passport and driving licence applications, issuance of traffic tickets, right up to death certification.
Malaysians will come under the management of a wide melange of companies, and pay all sorts of management fees month to month. The government will enjoy drastically reduced workload (even though the number of civil servants remains staggering. The government will evolve into a virtual organisation that will only show up shortly before the general elections.
What a peculiar phenomenon it is! I wonder whether the government is still effectively a government and who will come to the protection of our rights. — Sin Chiew Daily
* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail Online.
