Proposed KPIs should be carefully considered and implemented

Three hours is a good length of time. In three hours, you can be entranced by Dato’ Usman Awang’s greatest poems, or you could read Zaid Ibrahim’s book Saya Pun Melayu. You could watch Evolusi KL Drift twice, single-handedly prepare an authentic ayam masak kuning for fifty people, or reharmonise the Negeri Sembilan State Anthem. You can fly from KL to Miri, canoe from Kuala Terengganu to Redang, or drive from Singapore to Seri Menanti, or at least you ought to be able to.

But for three hours last week I was stuck between the Singapore and Malaysia immigration checkpoints on the Second Link. Yes, it was a long weekend for Singapore, and yes, Singaporeans must rightly be subjected to rigorous checks before being allowed entry into the motherland, but our immigration authorities should have been prepared for the exodus. Was no one at the Sultan Abu Bakar Complex briefed about this? Has this never happened before? And yet, as I contemplated joining the incontinent streams of travellers exiting their vehicles scurrying to find sufficient foliage to conceal necessary biological functions, it struck me that this cavalcade of Singaporeans, reeling from a very visible recession on their island, were using their Easter weekend to spend money in Malaysia.

Comforted by these indications of our religious freedom and economic superiority, I spent the remainder of the journey reading the various responses to the newly appointed Cabinet, and for the most part they were lukewarm, cautious or seething with contempt. One remarked that after the hype of a vastly reformed government, it was about as innovative as Fast and Furious 4, although at least the latter advertises its tagline “new model, original parts”.

The proposed Key Performance Indicators are a genuine improvement though, and these should be carefully considered and implemented. Although having lived in Blair’s Britain I hasten to add that KPIs have their own shortfalls: achieving the targets can become so obsessive that statistics are manipulated, when in fact there has been no change on results on the ground. One specific example from the UK is patients being shifted from one hospital waiting list to another, to satisfy targets on waiting times.

Ideally, the KPIs should be tied to specific manifesto commitments or other policy pronouncements, and monitoring should be by a parliamentary committee empowered to hold ministers to account, rather than a government agency which probably won’t. Proceedings of this committee should then be made public so that we can all see how well the ministers are performing on our behalf. If the members of the Cabinet were incentivised in this way to perform, then that would assuage some of the widespread concerns. We have a long way to go before we can expect our ministers to be subjected to a Jeremy Paxman – a legendary BBC presenter who barks questions at politicians frankly and entertainingly – but it would be a good thing if our politicians got used to a greater degree of regular scrutiny.

It occasioned that I sat next to one of these ministers at a very special historic event this week, and our chit-chat raised my hopes. I had spoken to this YB before, but here was a reminder that our political system has raised some outstandingly qualified members who are really on the ball. Yet it is true that even a collection of outstanding individuals need to balance different legitimate interests and make compromises guaranteed to anger others. That is one of the hallmarks of Cabinet collective responsibility; and thus here is another bonus of the proposed KPIs: to highlight the specific successes and failures of individual ministers. For competent ministers, it is a win-win situation.

There is one specific KPI I would like to foist upon leaders at the state level, and that is the extent to which they understand and use their constitutional rights and prerogatives. There were two sad headlines that demonstrated how weakly our federal structure is exercised by those charged to do so. First was the dilly-dallying over the appointment of the Penang Deputy Chief Minister I, in which the Chief Minister cheerfully passed the buck to the leader of his coalition at the federal level. Second was the weird absence of assemblymen in the Terengganu Legislative Assembly, which was reportedly defused when the Prime Minister “ordered” them to attend. But what has the federal Prime Minister got to do with the Terengganu Legislative Assembly? In other federal countries, state leaders rightly guard their rights and privileges to stem the centralisation of power and to ensure that their constitutional position is maintained. But here the state actors themselves are wantonly tolerating, even welcoming, central intervention. What a waste of 1948.

Failing that, how about a KPI for maximum waiting times at the Second Link?

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Tunku ’Abidin Muhriz is Director of the Malaysia Think Tank. Applications for the third Freedom Academy in Penang on 1-3 May are still open at www.waubebas.org. (As appeared in Abiding Times, the Sun on 17 April 2009).