Federal Government Is Failing – Is it so?

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Malaysia a failing nation, Perikatan Nasional a failing government and Tan Sri Muhyddin Yassin a failing Prime Minister: How far is this true, as alleged by the opposition and widely discussed in the online media.

Writers have quoted many dictionaries, such as Oxford and Cambridge dictionaries for definition. A failing nation is often defined as a situation where the nation is loosing control over its population on matters such as security, economics, defence, social matters, education or tax collection. Looking at this criteria, Malaysia is definitely not a failing nation.

How about a failing government as alleged by Lim Kit Siang, Anwar Ibrahim and other opposition leaders? In the present context, the ‘failures’ as perceived are in the present health and economic crisis we are facing now. So, in the first part of this article, let us examine the government’s conduct in managing the COVID-19 pandemic.

The government scored top marks in managing the pandemic in 2020- this was achieved despite the fact that Perikatan Nasional Government was only installed in February that year. Average daily cases were less than 100 until September but increased to a height of 2,500 new cases as at the end of December.

Malaysia’s 2020 figures are against a background of raging pandemic in US, Europe and many countries in the world. The United States to-date has a cumulative positive case of 33.7 mil persons with 607,000 deaths. United Kingdom by comparison has a cumulative case of 4.93 mil persons with 128,000 deaths.

By common ‘Malaysian Logic’ the developed countries are considered as failed states because of high daily case numbers they experienced last year. Some countries, by the same logic can be considered as excellent states because of zero cases, such as Yemen, Somalia and Sudan.

Naive leaders like Zahid Hamidi, might think so, so just elect him as the next Prime Minister.

However, this year the situation in the United States and European countries have improved tremendously with daily cases just at a fraction of what they experienced in 2020 after having implemented mass vaccination program early. Even in UK, where there is a recent upsurge of cases, hospitalization and ICU cases remain low. thanks to the vaccines.

Insya Allah, based on the empirical data available globally, Malaysians should have little to worry as long as we can achieve close to our vaccination target.

Unfortunately this year, Malaysia’s fight against Covid-19 is more challenging, partly because of some complacency that set in last year when there were few positive cases . Subsequently, the immunization roll out schedules were drawn too long, to end until mid 2022, reflecting lack of sense of urgency.

The government is not to blame totally. The people, earlier on, also did not see the urgency and did not anticipate the current raging phase of the pandemic. At that time the opposition preferred to criticize government procurement process, which they alleged as being not transparent and preferring crony companies.

There were politicians telling the government not to place early orders for the vaccines prior to final approval by the WHO. Tengku Razaleigh, in particular, was very vocal against government early procurement of Pfizer vaccines which he claimed as being still too risky at that stage to use on human.

Such attitudes delayed the procurement process. At a time of global pandemic when all countries were fighting to secure the limited vaccines, Malaysia had been too cautious and lost much momentum to roll out vaccination program early.

Luckily, there were some bright advisers to the government. There were those advising the government to order more doses, enough for 120-130% of the population. There were those who advised the government to prepare for any eventuality, in particular for the need to rev up the vaccine supply to cater for the working age population early, should the situation arise. As it turns out these are excellent advises that enable the government to speed up the vaccination procurement now.

The Above Chart shows the doses administered (in black) vs vaccine supplies (in yellow) to reach over 30 million doses, enough to cover approximately 50% of the nation’s population by end of August. As a comparison as at 7 July 2021 Singapore has fully vaccinated 39% of its population. So, we are only less than two months behind.

We may have heard of Singapore’s new approach to deal with COVID-19 cases where they will no longer focus on daily new cases, but instead on hospitalized cases and those that need ICU treatment. This is the most sensible approach which the city state and many other industrialized countries would be adopting, since they have fully vaccinated enough number of people. With vaccination done, COVID-19 is no longer dangerous, but only left with mild symptoms like common flue.

Malaysia’s record of infected front liners also confirm that those who receive two doses are almost free from serious symptoms, hence need no hospitalization.

It is therefore only logical that Malaysia should adopt this Singapore approach as early as August, when around 50% of Malaysians would be fully vaccinated.

By end of the year Malaysia would have vaccinated 80% of the country’s population, making it at par with the progress in Singapore. This is based on speeded up target that would otherwise only be reached in the 2nd Quarter of 2022. Let us all help and and pray that the target will be achieved, for the sake of Malaysian lives and livelihood.

Tan Sri Rafidah Aziz, in her recent video interview, was wrong in alleging that the government as being clueless on what to do. In fact the government has assembled the best possible crisis management team to face the current unprecedented dual health and economic crisis. She has never faced such a crisis before, simply because there were none. We happen to be an unlucky generation to face the pandemic of this magnitude in the entire human history.

As a retired minister it is best that Tan Sri Rafidah, without available data, just keeps quite rather that adding to the confusion.

Some experts and media writers questioned the government’s decision to impose nationwide MCO in June and half of July this year. While many urged the government to impose longer and earlier MCO, there are many that question the effectiveness of the MCO now. To understand the relevant facts and data, let us look at the chart below shared by Tan Sri Hisham Abdullah, the DG of the Malaysia Health Department:

In the above chart, the red curve shows the baseline trajectory before MCO was imposed on June 1 and three possible scenario outcome after that in green, yellow and blue.

It is clear that MCO 3 indeed capped the daily active cases to 120,000 only vs a maximum of 210,000 without it. This would have meant the pandemic would have overwhelmed our public healthcare facilities, if not for the imposition of MCO3.

In another familiar measure, daily cases did reach approximately 9,000 this year todate. “Without MCO3, the daily cases would have exceeded 13,000.

The daily case statistics remain largely between 6,000 and 9,000 today and we are yet to see it trending towards the 4,000 threshold criteria for the country to move towards Phase 2 of the National Recovery Plan. Details are shown in the Chart below:

Out of the total of 7,097 cases for the country, the above chart indicates that just only three areas namely, Selangor, Kuala Lumpur and Negeri Sembilan account for 4,912 or 69.2%. There is a failure in Selangor and Negeri Sembilan to contain the cases, but for Kuala Lumpur, due to being in the same geographical area, its cases likely gets mixed up with those from Selangor.

We should note that Kuala Lumpur has already achieved high vaccination rate and therefore unlikely to show high case numbers by itself and most, anyway, should need no hospitalization. As for other states the cases numbers are much lower and therefore not major issues.

The current vaccination status by states is given below:

A comparison by states indicates Kuala Lumpur with a vaccination achievement at 65.1% (single dose), followed by Sarawak 42.5% and Selangor 16.8%.

Available information indicates that Sarawak high vaccination achievement is accomplished due to excellent commitment by the state in providing logistics such as immunization centres, transportation, funding, as well as good cooperation with the Federal Government in the National Immunization program.

In contrast the actual roll out in Selangor is far slower, affected by political intrigues and lack of cooperation with the Federal Government. There are already blames on the Pakatan Harapan Governments in Selangor and Negeri Sembilan in the media. It is yet to be seen whether Selangor could catch up in the next three months.

The above covers the Health aspects of the Pandemic. In the second phase of this article, I will cover the business and economic aspects and how these affect the nation. (To be continued)

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.DAH IKHWAN

Note: Malaysia has recorded 13,215 cases today of which 12,684 cases are with no or light symptoms. Only 531 cases are of category 3 to 5 with lung infection that need oxygen assistance. (update Berita Harian 16 July 2021)