Stop denying [the Elephantine] race factor in civil service recruitment

Stop denying race factor in civil service recruitment


YOURSAY | 'Non-Malays stopped applying as they are not called for interviews.'

Civil service commission insists no racism in recruitment 😂😁😅😆😜

Vijay47: Public Services Commission (PSC), your frantic defence of government service intake has about as much credibility as Congress of Unions of Employees in the Public and Civil Services (Cuepacs) president Adnan Mat’s statement. Believe me, that does not say much about either of you.

And members of the audience like PAS’ Razman Zakariah rushing to echo the call hardly do anything to strengthen your stand though his is accompanied by the inevitable religious slant.

At the pain of sounding repetitious, I will focus on some basic arguments you would offer, the most desperate being that much as the harvest is great, the non-Malay labourers are few.

Non-Malays simply do not apply.

How did this situation arise, especially since non-Malays had traditionally been keen on joining the civil service? Why did they suddenly stop trying?

Let me suggest an extremely minor cause - after years of applying, the non-Malays realised that almost none of them were being called for interviews and being selected, despite your assurance “there is no racial discrimination in the recruitment of civil servants”.

Thus, in sheer despair at the futility, the non-Malays stopped humiliating themselves further. Yeah, every non-Malay wants to work in Singapore, start billion-ringgit businesses, and stop playing football and hockey.

No doubt in your next statement, PSC, you will strut out your Mother Teresa defence, where the racial percentages of acceptance into service would be proudly presented.

You will state that fully 38 percent of non-Malays who applied were appointed, while the corresponding figure for Malays was a mere 23 percent.

Yeah sure. You conveniently forgot to mention that a total of 4,186 non-Malays were recruited while the figure for Malays was 89,752.

“No racial discrimination,” you say? What is the number of non-Malays in crucial positions, like in finance, defence, home affairs, and education? How many non-Malay secretaries-general, vice-chancellors, and professors are there?

Yeah, I know, for the latter two, you will piously lament they don’t fall under PSC.

With all this brilliance, merit and competence, including hundreds of PhDs every year, why do Malays still need crutches and walking sticks in every other area?

Siva1967: “PSC said in a statement that the method of appointing civil servants is transparent and based on the candidate’s merit and competence, adding that no quota was set for any particular race or ethnicity.”

The PSC expects the public to believe this. Please for heaven’s sake, as the Malay idiom goes “Jangan menegakan benang yang basah” (don’t try to uphold something wrong as right).

It is clear that the hiring and promotion within the civil service, including enforcement agencies, are skewed racially. There is no need for extensive, data capturing. There is no need for lengthy random surveys to be carried out.

A mere visual observation is enough to ascertain that only a single ethnicity dominates the public sector and then a few “dots” of other ethnics are “hired” as an eye wash and to chest thump that Malaysia is a multi-racial country and gives all its citizens equal opportunity and so on.

The statement issued is utter rubbish. My peers and I of the same generation had lost out tremendously simply due to the skewed unwritten policy. We lost not because we were not qualified, we lost not because we were not able to converse fluently in Malay. In fact, the opposite is more accurate.

Upon completing our Form 6 in 1986, after obtaining the STPM results in early 1987, I relentlessly tried to secure a job coming from a family of 90 percent government servants, the obvious path for me was the civil service.

This was due to the fact I had made the cut for a public university and my retired Public Works Department dad had no money to send me for private education.

My applications were sent to the KL City Council, Inland Revenue Board, police, armed forces, Health Ministry, Fire and Rescue Department, Forestry Department and whatnot. There were no responses from any of these agencies nor a letter of acknowledgement of receiving my applications.

However, my Malay peers, who had lesser qualifications and results than I and did not make it to either Form 6 or to the many Malay-dominated higher learning institutions and matriculation courses, landed jobs in some of the abovementioned agencies.

Many of my Malay friends in the late 80s received a spot in the civil service but I had to struggle to find a job.

This is how my generation had it in the early years of our lives. So please don’t try to hoodwink the public and say PSC did not discriminate in their hiring process.

Anonymous 10928: This is certainly a misuse of the civil service for one’s political interests or for the interests of a certain political party by reserving jobs for potential voters from a majority race.

Not only that, but they are also more obsessed with the promotions of civil servants to gain their support for certain political parties rather than for their services to the public.

No investigation done on this matter? Why was no action taken against those who commit this malpractice?

Isn’t it stated in the general orders for civil service that any decision made, or actions taken in the civil service is to be for the good of the service and the public and not to prioritise the gains for any civil servant or any particular political party?

***

Attached an old post 'Ops Isi Penuh Revisited', as follows:

Malaysiakini letter by Dr Kua Kia Soong (Extracts):

Centre for Global Affairs Malaysia (Icon) president Abdul Razak Baginda recently reproached journalist John Pennington for an article that places Malaysia’s civil service in an unfavourable light in comparison with its Singapore counterpart.

Among the reasons for the Malaysian civil service’s lower proficiency, Pennington claimed, were its size and its dominance by Malays. Razak’s rebuttal offers no good justifications for the bloated civil service in Malaysia, except to say it has to do with the need for ‘affirmative action’. Methinks Razak Baginda doth protest too much.

Malaysia’s bureaucracy is one of the biggest in the world, with 1.3 million civil servants from a population of 30 million, or 4.5 percent, compared with Singapore’s civil service (1.5 percent), or those of Hong Kong and Taiwan (2.3 percent).

We are spending more than RM41 billion a year for upkeep of the civil service. Now you could protest that Singapore and Hong Kong are small city states, but what about a larger country like Taiwan?

While it is the growing trend of many countries to reduce the size of their civil service, Malaysia’s Prime Minister’s Department in particular has done the opposite. It has more than doubled the number of civil servants from 21,000 to 43,554. In stark contrast, the White House employs only 1,888 staff.

Now, what was it that Pennington said that riled Razak Baginda?

FMT reported (extracts):

Pennington highlighted a 2015 World Bank report that ranked Singapore as the world’s best for government effectiveness. Malaysia was placed 43rd among 170 countries.

Among the reasons for the Malaysian civil service’s lower proficiency, Pennington claimed, were its hugeness and its dominance by Malays.

He also said Singapore’s decision to pay its civil servants well and its willingness to embrace new technology were some of the reasons for its civil service’s proficiency.

Razak slammed back, saying ........

........ he would advise Pennington to get a better perspective of things before making such comparisons.

“I would like to quote our great Dr Mahathir Mohamad who once asked: ‘What’s so difficult about managing Singapore? It’s like managing Kuala Lumpur,'” he said.

“In terms of diversity, population size, physical size and much more, managing Singapore is just like managing Kuala Lumpur. You cannot compare oranges and lemons.”

He pointed out that Singapore also did not have to deal with the unique challenges Malaysia faced, such as affirmative action policies.

Both Dr Kua and Razak Baginda have been right, to wit, Razak's contention the bloated civil service has to do with someone's affirmative' action (yes, Razak doth protest too much and I'll come to this in a while) as well as Dr Kua's criticism of the Malaysian civil service as being over-bloated and inefficient.

I needn't go into the issue that the Malaysian Civil Service, which includes its Armed Forces, Police, Immigration, Customs, etc etc etc are made up on almost one race, namely, the Malays.

It is an issue born out of official approval.

Once upon a time there was an administrative Operation called Ops 'Isi Penuh', whence Civil Service leaders were ORDERED to f**king staff their departments up, or ELSE.

Guess who gave that order?

T'was none other than the Emperor who mutilated the Constitution, Judiciary, Senate and of course the Malaysian Civil Service.

Yes, it was affirmative action, to remove unemployed idling but voting-youths off the street and presumably into UMNO's vote bank. But the Operation was over-the-top, perhaps because we had lots and lots of money from our once wealthy oil resources, so WTF with a few pence here and there - all sap sap suoi stuff. Thus was his reign blessed with mucho money to waste in a profligate manner.

Even Malay Department heads grumbled at the reckless silliness of 'Isi Penuh', but what could they do against His Imperial Majesty? By the end of 2006, more than 90% of 1.15 civil servants were Malays.

That was how your once-Emperor operated.

Yes, the Operation was ordered from the No 1 Man, thus in the mad rush to meet his imperial order, rubbish was recruited in that Nazi-ordered 'Isi Penuh' scramble, and thus today you'd get rubbish out, and the malaise has not stop since.

Today it's no longer his problem - usual stuff, his successorS have to deal with it.

Earlier this year, Second Finance Minister Johari Abdul Ghani openly and honestly stated that the civil service, although bloated, will not be reduced, but it will be made more multi-tasked, to improve productivity. This statement is serious but is also worrisome.

We now have one civil servant serving 19.37 people. The ratio is 1:110 for Indonesia, and for China 1:108, while it is 1:50 for South Korea. We won’t compare ourselves to the low ratio of 1:71.4 in Singapore because it’s embarrasing.

Razak Baginda repeated Maddy's kok-tok about Singapore being like ruling KL, when even KL itself did not perform to support his views.

You need only look at how Singapore is being run to see the nonsense of Razak Baginda's valiant but vain attempt to defend Mahathir's policies.

Currently, the Civil service costs RM74 Billion per annum (2016 figures) and another RM19 Billion n pension.

Productivity is sh*t considering we have 1 civil servant per 19.37 people, yet there have been undue delays, corruption and lackadaisical attitude in services towards the public.

The downhill journey for our once-impeccable Civil Service started with Operasi Isi Penuh which doubled its workforce of approximately 400,000 to a massive 800,000 in 1983. As just mentioned, the imperial conceptualizer was none other than your only Emperor of Malaysia.

Like most of his schemes, his Operasi Isi Penuh wasa terrible failure.

But in fixing a tactical problem he endowed us with a strategic headache, as he had done so with so many other issues, eg. judiciary, senate, forex, bmf, bank bumiputra, maminco, memali, Sabah illegal influx, perwaja, proton, bakun, road tolls, etc etc etc - so what's new?

My uncles and friends related how Operasi Isi Penuh was seen to be exorbitantly, needlessly and excessively profligate in its implementation, where they recalled department heads being instructed in no uncertain terms and even pressured to 'top up' their staffing a.s.a.p.

Suffice to say it was all about political gains for Maddy and his ruling party, and not so much about public service for the rakyat, because even until today, many Malaysians even have mucho complaints about services at government departments and agencies, where in some extreme cases, the public servants became the Tuan and the tuan-rakyat became the servants.

But Razak Baginda has been right in that it was 'affirmative action' but masked as such to hide its real aim, that not unlike Project Blue IC in Sabah.

I wonder whether such profligacy, as in our numerous cases of profligacy over the past 35 years, was an outcome from the curse rather than the blessing of our then considerable oil and gas assets.

We then had too much wealth which might possibly have led to such excessive extravaganza including, I heard, dropping a Proton Saga at the North Pole - and for what? For Santa Claus?