I have no quarrel with the 9th Malaysia Plan recently tabled in Parliament by our prime minister. It is an ambitious road map for the next five years that hopefully will help us attain significant progress towards achieving our objectives of becoming a fully industrialised nation by 2020. As a multiracial country, the social dimension of the plan in terms of wealth distribution has also been factored in. The fast-changing business environment brought about by the emergence of advanced technology, particularly in ICT, and the adoption of new business models in meeting the challenges of globalisation have all been considered.

Our good infrastructure is to be further improved. Disparity in the economic development among the various states and between the urban and rural areas are to be addressed whilst harnessing the best of their available recourses. Indeed, it is a monumental document that was prepared through very intensive consultations between the public and private sectors with all the relevant stake holders having a hand in it. It should therefore be owned by all of us and it is our duty to ensure that it would become a reality.

The plan has given a very strong emphasis on the development of human capital to help the country shift to higher value chain levels to enhance our national wealth creation capability. The challenge, really, is to produce an adequate number of knowledge workers to realise this plan. There has been serious mis-match in the knowledge, skills, and attributes of our available human capital against those required by the industry presently, let alone meeting their future needs. The problem here is that our local academia is still harbouring an 'elite' mentality. For instance, most of the vice-chancellors would still argue that it is not their responsibility to produce graduates that could immediately be productively employed by the industry. They maintain that their primary

responsibility is to produce 'thinking' graduates rather then skillful graduates.

They talk more about academic ideals, such as creating a 'full man' who has developed a critical and inquiring mind, capable of contributing towards expanding the discipline of his specialisation. The industry on the other hand, demands precooked graduates that are well-prepared to contribute immediately to their bottom-line and help battle the competition. The government does not appear to be able to resolve this problem well enough. As a result of this, the number of unemployed graduates will continue to swell. At the moment, there are more than 60,000 unemployed graduates with most of them coming from public universities.

The large amount of allocations given to the east coast states of Kelantan and Terengganu and also to Sabah and Sarawak hopefully comes from a sincere and sustainable commitment by the federal government to develop these states to catch up with the rest. It should not just be a political agenda of the BN.

Our failure has always been at the point of implementation and delivery. Frankly, the government administration continues to be wrought with inefficient administration with too many rules and mysterious exceptions. These not only will continue to frustrate our development efforts but it will be very fertile grounds for the perpetuation of corruption. Too many promises and budget allocations have been made and given to us that this would be overcome. This, however, up to now has not been accomplished. Corruption, poor project management, and dishonest practices at the point of implementation has been our nemesis.

It is therefore our earnest hope that these perennial issues could be resolved once for all.