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"national building process - the private sector as the engine of growth, the public sector as facilitator and regulator, and civil society and others as partners in development."

WE are all united as one and citizens in equal partnership for the purpose of construction of such sentences. Otherwise, you got UMNOputras, Malays Chinese, Indians and Others! And as for who going to get maximum benefits from the RM200 billion, well, the Chinese and the Indians can dream on, but pay your bloody taxes o.k.! But then again if you ae one of those Chinese who take on what the UMNOPutra cannot do..congratulations la!

Naturally govt contracts will go to certain parties, national policies will be designed to make money for the same parties and all that spending means they can take whatever they can while they can. Now they've given themselves another 10 years to make sure certain bumis get their cut while other bumis will only be the stat to prove the income disparity. Non bumis can act now or continue to take it lying down.

I have no quarrel with the 9th Malaysia Plan recently
tabled in Parliament by our Prime Minister. It is an
ambitious road map for the next 5 years that hopefully
would help us attain significant progress towards
achieving our objectives of becoming a fully
industrialized nation by 2020. As a multi racial
country, the social dimension of the plan in terms of
wealth distribution had also been factored in. The
fast changing business environment brought about by
the emergence of advanced technology, particularly in
ICT, and the adoption of new business models in
meeting the challenges of globalisation had all been
considered. Our good infrastructure is to be further
improved .Disparity in the economic development among
the various states and between the urban and rural
areas are to be addressed whilst harnessing the best
of their available resourses. Indeed it is a
monumental document that was prepared through very
intensive consultations between the public and private
sectors with all the relevant stake holders having a
hand in it .It should therefore be owned by all of us and
it is our duty to ensure that it would become a
reality.

The plan had given a very strong emphasis on the
development of human capital to help the country shift
to higher levels of value chain to enhance our
national wealth creation capability. The challenge
really is to produce adequate required knowledge
workers to realize this plan. There had been serious
miss-match in the knowledge, skills, and attributes of
our available human capital against those required by
the industry presently, let alone meeting their future
needs. The problem here is that our local academia is
still harbouring elite’s mentality. For instance, most
of the vice-chancellors would still argue that it is
not their responsibility to produce graduates that
could immediately be productively employed by the
industry. They maintained that their primary
responsibility is to produce “thinking” graduates
rather then skillful graduates. They talk more about
academic ideals ,such as, creating full man who has
develop a critical and inquiring mind , capable of
contributing towards expanding the discipline of his
specialisation.The industry on the other hand demands
precooked graduates that are well prepared to
contribute immediately to their bottom-line and help
battle the competition. The government does not appear
to be able to resolve this problem well enough. As a
result of this the number of unemployed graduates
would continue to swell. At the moment there are more
than 60,000 unemployed graduates with most of them
coming from public universities.

The large amount of allocation given to east-coast
states of Kelantan and Trengganu and also to Sabah and
Serawak hopefully came from a sincere and sustainable
commitment of the federal government to develop these
states to catch-up with the rest .It should not just
be an unsustainable political agenda for the National
Front to launch a concerted effort to take over the
state of Kelantan and to consolidate its position in
the next general election.

Our failure has always been at the point of
implementation and delivery .Frankly the government
administration continues to be wrought with
inefficient administration with too many rules and
mysterious exceptions. These not only will continue to
frustrate our development efforts but it would
continue to be very fertile grounds for the
perpetuation of corruption. Too many promises and
budget allocation had been made and given to us that
this would be overcome. This however up to now had not
been accomplished. Corruption, poor project
management, and dishonest practices at the point of
implementation had been our nemesis.

It is therefore our earnest hope that these perennial
issues could be resolved once for all.