By Dr Chen Man Hin, DAP life advisor
Can PM transform Malaysia to become a high income nation in 2016. When he cannot improve the economy to join the Asia tigers club of Singapore, Hong Kong, S. Korea and Taipei?
When became PM in 2009, Najib announced his proposals to transform the economy with his Economic Transformation Program (ETP) by injection of tens of billion ringgits promised largely by government related companies. His predecessor Tun Mahathir also injected billions but the economy scarcely moved and the FDIs did not come in.
But money is not the primary mover of the economy. More importantly it is manpower.
Since 1970, the NEP has been a negative factor to drive the economy. With the NEP the GDP of Malaysia began to fall far behind those of Singapore, Hong Kong, S. Korea and Taiwan. Even now, the NEP has been a major factor in chasing away hundreds of thousands of our skilled manpower overseas, and this has affected the economy. While the four tigers leaped ahead to high income economies, while Malaysia stagnated. Even today, the NEP continues to disappoint the young men and women who continue to emigrate overseas to seek better opportunities. Statistics show a million of young Malaysians are now overseas, with half of them in Singapore. Largely because of their skills, the Singapore economy has rocketed upwards, and its per capita income is now the highest in Asia.
Because of the NEP, our youths are not properly educated. Science and Maths are the foundation stones to train our youths in schools and universities to be engineers, scientists and research workers to propel our society into the IT era. Proficiency in English is the key to Science and Maths. And yet the ministry is not keen to keep PPSMI policy to teach our students to be conversant with English.
It is the basic thing to do, to use English to teach science and maths in schools and universities, so that the country can be an IT economy, which translates to a high income economy.
The World Bank has produced a paper criticising the NEP as the cause for the deterioration of academic standards of Malaysian universities. It is a sad thing to report that world renowned ranking organisations have not ranked our universities as world class like National University of Singapore and Hong Kong University. As a matter of fact, not one university in Malaysia is ranked as world class.
So much for PM Najib boast that our country will be 1 Malaysia.