Now that some equity ownership rules and the teaching of science and mathematics in English have been scrapped, it’s time to consider junking another de facto policy: the appointment of prime minister as finance minister and prospective PM as education minister.

For the sake of truly advancing our economy and education, we need to start a new tradition of appointing persons with more expertise and less entanglement, men or women of integrity who can truly be unifying leaders and effective, undistracted administrators.

The policy changes reveal a BN machine stuck in a time and a mode of governing that are passing. In those glory days, not too long ago, the PM could make policy off the cuff. Mahathir thought it would be groovy to teach maths and science in English, and that was it. The system went into overdrive to meet a gravely short deadline, so we had swanky programmes without savvy people to run them.

The way Najib Abdul Razak and Muhyiddin Yassin have explained their policies displays a woeful, yet familiar, neglect of consideration and thought.

The relaxation of bumiputera equity ownership rules will upset some, but perhaps not many, since participation has not become broadly distributed. Besides, a new stallion is arriving, Ekuinas, and GLCs will be asked to divest non-core assets. There will be lots of capital up for grabs here, and so far, the indications are that Ekuinas will report to... the PM!

The finance minister, who is also prime minister, clearly wanted to draw excited attention to the loosening of regulations which would gladden many non-bumiputera who’ve fallen out of love with BN. And he spared us the boring details of how Ekuinas will operate. He said more information will be forthcoming, as an afterthought to a done deal. However, we deserve to hear in detail about this entirely new and powerful institution before it is established.

The education minister similarly calmed fears over the gap in English usage in schools due to the policy reversal. But how he arrived at the solution we are not told. We are left to trust that he knows best. After all, he is also the deputy prime minister. At least in shutting down one programme he made some reference to a survey that the policy had not worked. But he rolled out another without any academic substantiation.

Thus, in replacement of teaching maths and science in English, pupils will be given – or be subjected to – more time in English classes, taught by an increased corps of trained teachers. This is the cornerstone of the policy to arrest declining English proficiency.

Now think, if students are not well served by current English lessons, or are bored stiff with the way schools are conducted in general, with more programmes and IT and less competent and enthusiastic teachers, how will increasing their time in these classes help raise English proficiency? More basically, can we hope to improve English if we do not promote reading and thinking – in any language?

Are our teachers promoting reading and thinking? Muhyiddin spouts the jargon we keep hearing, about ‘comprehensive, balanced and holistic’ approaches, but never wonders whether teachers have appreciation and confidence to impart comprehensive, balance and holistic learning.

These things cannot be trained or programmed; you have to seek out the people who love to learn and coax them to teach. No education minister in recent, and probably long, memory, has made reinvigorating the teaching profession and increasing salaries and rewards a priority.

So, recent policy shifts will scratch the itch in some political constituencies, and deliver some small fixes.

But solutions to the many education and economic challenges we face will remain rash, opaque and fundamentally unreformed, unless we have as education minister someone who knows and cares about fostering a culture of learning (and its devious offspring, dissent), and unless our finance minister is one who is not driven primarily to concentrate power in his hands.