It is amusing, in fact comical, when I read the piece on “futuristic thinking” and “thinking outside the box” by Mohd Irwan Serigar Abdullah, the Treasury secretary-general (Irwan: Futuristic streak needed to survive in today’s world). It is as if he was speaking in total oblivion about what is happening in the country today.

Look, the country needs neither urging nor advice from the secretary-general to adopt and assimilate new technology and to think outside the box for our future. What the country needs is a proper governing environment for entrepreneurship and innovation to thrive without being unduly hindered by poor regulations and policies.

Instead of dispensing advice, the secretary-general and the rest of the top echelon of the civil service should seriously look at themselves. They must examine how their series of omissions and commissions have run this country to the ground.

No one doubts the importance of technology. But as the secretary-general, I wish he could focus more on what the civil service has done in the past and how it has affected the present. In particular, I think our natural resource management (mining, timber, water, rivers, and seas), waste disposal, environment degradation, education and public transportation system and infrastructure need urgent attention.

It is my humble opinion that most are in tatters, requiring a major overhaul.

Why talk about the Uber application as if it is a cutting-edge technology in public transportation when the civil service, till today, is unable to provide a level-field environment for both Uber and taxis to co-exist. For Mohd Irwan’s information, the Uber application is a rudimentary technology, not a cutting-edge one as he made it out to be.

I think Mohd Irwan Serigar is being condescending when he claimed how other countries, including Singapore, are currently pursuing the same transformation initiatives like Malaysia. Seriously, what great transformation initiatives have we achieved thus far other than pouring more money and resources into what we are doing but only the queue has become longer as happened in our Immigration Department?

Seriously, I think he should talk less of the grandeur stuff and spend more time advising the government on how to think outside the box to get rid of corruption, leakages and mega-incompetence now pervasively prevailing in the country.

By the way, I think he should stop trying to impress others with his technical jargon like fintech in banking when the world has seen so little done on money-laundering, financial frauds and scams.

I am an Ah Beng. Ah Beng believe in solving simpler problems first.