Unfinished business
New Straits Times (Columns)
13 Sep 2006

IN the memorable lines which have passed into the English language as a pithy proverb, the 18th century Scottish poet Robert Burns observed that the best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry. It rings true today for the country’s development plans.

More than 2,000 of the 6,000 projects hatched under the Eighth Malaysia Plan have not been completed, or even got off the ground. One would have thought that with 50 years of five-year development plans under our belts, we would be capable of doing a better job of drawing up the blueprints and implementing them.

However, as the more than one in three 8MP projects attests, neither time nor experience seems to have been able in great measure to remove or reduce those bottlenecks which delay delivery.

The achievement of the targets set for the Ninth Malaysia Plan very much depends on the ability to prevent a repeat of the conditions that have created this massive backlog of development projects and the consequent need to make up for the shortfall within the next five years. Keeping tabs on the progress of the unfinished work from the 8MP and the fresh projects under the 9MP is never going to be an easy task.

However, unless problems are nipped in the bud and swift remedial measures taken, there’s always a danger that projects will stall, and we would then be forced to play catch-up in the next development cycle.

Since indifference seems to be at the root of the laxity in supervision, there appears to be a need for more hands-on management, real-time monitoring and early warning systems to troubleshoot problems and eliminate the logjams.

Since projects also invariably cut across departmental boundaries, there is a need for improved inter-agency co-operation at all stages of planning and execution, as well as better co-ordination with state governments and local authorities.

While there has been no lack of co-ordinating mechanisms of every kind to improve Federal-state and inter-agency co-operation, there’s little point to the co-ordinating committee meetings if very little actually gets done.

A bad habit seems to have developed of late of referring even the most mundane of matters to the Cabinet, when these should have been sorted out at the working level of day-to-day implementation.

The Cabinet should not be expected to decide on each and every problem that crops up. The buck should stop with the ministry, agency or department responsible for the project.