Lim Kit Siang

Call on Najib to initiate a series of annual International Malaysian Diaspora Conference to coincide with the launch of Tenth Malaysia Plan in June

Kit

The Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak is making his first five-day official visit to India next week from 19th to 23rd January.

There are many things Najib can learn from the Indian experience in government reform and transformation, one of which is the just-concluded ninth Pravasi Bharatiya Diswas (BPD-2010) in New Delhi – the annual jamboree of the Indian diaspora organized by the Indian Government to rope in the expertise, money and experience of the 25 million Indians abroad (or non-resident Indians).

Najib had said in Singapore in November that his government would make Malaysia a better place to live and work in to lure back its citizens residing abroad as well as attract global talents to the country.

He told a dinner he hosted for the Malaysian community in Singapore: “We will create more opportunities, more excitement and more buzz in Malaysia to attract the Malaysian diaspora and expatriates to the country.”

Sadly and unfortunately, Najib has not been able to walk the talk and the buzz he had initially created from the expenditure of tens of millions of ringgit in the promotion of the “1Malaysia” campaign by professional publicity agents has fizzled out – the bubbles of “1Malaysia” bursting against hard realities like the adverse international publicity which Malaysia has been suffering since the beginning of the new year as a result of the “Allah” controversy.

Only last night, the Grace Global Prayer Church in Rasah, Seremban became the tenth church to be attacked and the 12th target of vandalism since the Kuala Lumpur High Court judgment on the “Allah” controversy on Dec. 31.

The tweet of Foo Chee Hoe on my twitter last night “How many more churches to vandalize? Don’t they know they are putting their religion to shame instead of defending His name?” is the cry of all sane and rational Malaysians, regardless of race or religion, for an end to the madness since the beginning of the year.

Recently Parliament was informed that in the 18 months from March 2008 to August last year, a total of 304,358 Malaysians left the country for better education, career and business prospects, which works out to some 630 Malaysians leaving the country per day.

If this rate of migration had been kept up, some 400,00 Malaysians would have migrated from March 2008 to the end of last year.

Najib had said in his Singapore speech last November that “in the current challenging world, Malaysia needed the best talents and brains to develop and prosper the country” but it would not be easy to get them because competition was stiff as other countries were also looking for global talents.

However, despite all the publicity about KPIs, NKRAs and Government Transformation Programme, the Najib government has not convinced Malaysians or the Malaysian Diaspora that he meant what he said when he admitted that “without good brains Malaysia could not be considered a knowledge-based or innovation economy”.

All Malaysians must be concerned that instead of engineering a reverse brain drain of Malaysians out in the world, there is an acceleration of migration of Malaysians across-the-board – not just Chinese and Indians but Malays as well, especially with the latest developments arising from the “Allah” controversy.

Why have the “reverse brain-drain” policies of the Eighth and Ninth Malaysia Plans from 2001-2010 failed? Is Najib prepared to issue a White Paper on the reasons for these failures in the past decade?

The government had announced an ambitious “reverse brain drain project” under the Eighth Malaysia Plan, especially in the key fields of information and communications technology, science and technology, manufacturing industries, finance and medicine, to propel Malaysia to transform itself into a K-economy and Information Society through a two-prong strategy, viz: