Screenshots

Heard of Vietnam on the road to recovery
Yet to see it clearly as a new discovery?

Samuel Goh Kim Eng - 050508
http://MotivationInMotion.blogspot.com
Mon. 5th May 2008.

Now that you have been there soaked in the economic conditions there as compared to Penang, can you now see how competitive we need to be?

how cheap their labor costs are? and the quality of work that they can produce?

so, what have we been bragging about?

We are caught in a vacuum.

We can't be like Singapore so long as our policies remain loaded in order to maintain a status quo anchored to primordial mindsets.

We can't be like Vietnam because we have wasted too much time and money chasing hype and pipe dreams instead of hunkering down to working hard and smart and investing in constant value creation.

That we say no minimum wage in order to try to compete with the likes of Vietnam, Indonesia, India and China is actually an indicting reflection that we have lost it. We are just grasping for straws. Meanwhile we close our doors to the type of meritocracy practiced by Singapore because to open those doors would mean there will have to be the sort of changes that the suboh's of Umno will kill to prevent, even when they themselves know that without those changes their own families won't be having much of a future in these times of rising prices and steaming competition.

So where are we? We are neither here nor there. We are in limbo. In a limbo-rock vacuum, there is no oxygen.

To compound matters, we are caught in the vortex of a quasi-government state. Federal under Barisan only provides less than half the funds needed by States run by Pakatan. Yet these states run by Pakatan contribute more than half the funds to the nation, while at the same time hamstrung by federal policies which leak and flimflam. Furthermore, too many of the new state governments are finding that the civil service in their states still maintain some cloistered cosy hankering for the old ways of their former bosses which make it only too easy for them to throw bureaucratic monkey wrenches into the new administration, thereby delaying reforms and progress.

While these forms over substance continue unabated, politicians continue to scratch their heads on what to say and do next in order to maintain their denial modes. They show they are not leaders of the nation but only protectors of their political fiefdoms. How else can one explain why someone from party A is castigated for trying to do something that will improve the competitiveness of a state run by party B when in the final analysis, the objective is to improve the livelihood of the rakyat of that state? Are we to conclude that party A prioritizes its own sensibility over and above the interest of the rakyat it presumes to champion?

Likewise, donations to charities. Does it matter if the funds are to be disbursed by a party B state or a party A state when the suffering which those funds is to alleviate does not differentiate along political lines? And if the answer is still yes that they are party-based, doesn't that insult the donors by implying they had donated based on political prejudices?

With countries like Vietnam breathing down our necks, can we still afford to be a country of hypocritical emperors, little napoleons, and court jesters? They have no clothes on but there are still people walking around searching for the shiniest buttons for them.

Meanwhile the price of oil goes up and our oil reserves go down. What happens the day we start being a net oil importer while still run by a govt whose revenues half come from oil taxes? Today they subsidize the cost of living. Tomorrow when they have no oil revenue, how are they to subsidize the cost of living in a situation where to create a new, competitive, revenue-generating and national paradigm will take at least three generations. We have only two years.

We are standing at the edge of a precipice. If countries like Vietnam catch up with us and investors fly to them, what will our rakyat be doing then when they cannot afford the things they need everyday because the govt has used up all its reserves to subsidize their costs? Get the arabs to subsidize us and put up the next welcoming kompang for the new colonialists of those who were themselves colonialized by the same colonialists expelled by us?

Wake up.