Blooted CIvil Service

Lots of countries are facing unemployment as their biggest internal threat. People without job will not pay taxes, fuel up domestic crimes, dissatisfy with the rulers, and usually will give up their votes to the opposition.  Our country Malaysia is also facing the unemployment threats and in order to overcome, the present ruling government had come out with a unique solution.  Great, it is successfully delayed the crisis but unluckily not yet to solve.

As a record, Malaysia’s civil service is the most over bloated in the world. As at 2010, it numbers about 1.2 million employees on the government payroll out of a population of 28 million. The civil service has been expanding rapidly since the 1990s and its growth has been accelerated especially fast since 2007. In 1990, the government had 773,997 employees, by the year 2000 there were 894,788 staff members and by 2010 about 1.2 million.

Have we ever heard about the civil servant who had been terminated from their job if they gave a bad performance? The civil service is none other than an “iron rice bowl”. The racist teachers who gave a very bad influence towards the students only being transferred into another school, the officers who misused millions of government money were transferred into other departments, and so on. It is hard to find a civil servant who had been punished for their bad performance by being terminated from their job.

In 2005, the government’s emoluments expenses to maintain the civil service is RM25.6 billion and in 2008 it was RM41 billion (an increase of 60.2%). Our nation operating budget had been increase steadily, 23.3% in 2006, 25.5% in 2007, 28.1% in 2008, 24.6% in 2009 and 33.1% in 2010 ; from 101.2 billion in 2006 to RM154.2 billion three years later in 2009. If we take pensions into account, emoluments and pensions as a percentage of the government’s operating expenditure, the increase is from 29.8% in 2006 to 41.6% in 2010, such a huge increase that will reduce fund for development.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development (OECD) shows Malaysia having the highest ratio of civil servants to the population in the Asia-Pacific region at 4.68% with Indonesia having 1.79%, Philippines 1.81%, South Korea 1.85% and Thailand 2.06%.

From Human Resource perspective, I do think that we need to overcome the unemployment issue in a more holistic way. Not by simply hiring unemployed people into the government. As at October 2011, our country debt already reached almost half trillion. The question is, do we dare to pay 50-60 billion per year just for the interest charge? Such a huge waste should be avoided.

Our government should reduce the civil servants gradually. Abolish redundant jobs. As simple as, why do we need to register with Suruhanjaya Pillihanraya (SPR) if we want to cast a vote while the system in Jabatan Pendaftaran Negara already have all the information. Automatic registration will do and reduce the number of workforce involve.