I refer to your news report entitled "Graduates not competitive due to poor English" released by Bernama, and would like to point out the problem of unemployment among local graduates is not entirely due to poor command of English.

Basically unemployment is an economic sickness, triggered off by poor economic management or blatant mismanagement.

One does not need to look far, just ask around your friends in the corporate circle, if their work force stands at 10 persons now, five years ago, how many were employed in the same company ?

I believe that you will be shocked to learn that the work force is dwindling rather than expanding over the last five years.

There are a number of factors contributing to the dwindling work force, some may be due to automation and computerisation, but on the darker side it is because the economy is not expanding at a competitive rate, putting pressure on employers to scale down their operation.

The population is growing each year, our universities are churning out more graduates each semester, but if job opportunities are not growing at sustainable rate, are employment opportunities going to fall down from the sky ?

However, the government of day cannot admit that they are responsible for poor economic planning and management, resulting in slow growth rate and dwindling job opportunities for the graduates.

Otherwise they would become the target of attack across the political divide and finally be thrown out at the ballot box.

In order to shift away their responsibilities, these powerful political and bureaucratic elite start playing the blame-storming techniques.

They put the blame squarely on students and lecturers, so that parents and society at large would start barking up the wrong tree.

I for one would say that it is nothing so wrong and so helpless about our universities setup; the lecturers, the students, the course content and the basic infrastructure.

However, economic mismanagement and planning is something outside the control of universities. It is true that by reading into specific market survey done on unemployment, the outcome would generally point to poor command of English.

It is so because the survey instrument was specifically designed to draw a particular conclusion and put the blame on students, lecturers and universities.

The outcome would be totally different if the survey questionnaire could inquire into whether the corporate circle themselves are actually expanding or scaling down in terms of work force and investment over the last five years.

The corporate circle would not take the blame that they are not doing a little CSR (corporate social responsibility) by creating more job opportunities within their own operational framework.

On the question of unemployment, too much blame has been loaded onto the shoulders of students and lecturers, while the political and bureaucratic elite continue to mismanage and mishandle economic issues.

Within those academic institutions, on-going discussions and meetings are being held to try to uplift the standard of English among graduates but it is an exercise in futility.

As long as the economy is not growing at competitive rate, more and more graduates will continue to be unemployed, unless we cut down the intake of students.

Even if remedial action to improve English is successful, it would only mean that the ones with better language skills get employed by rule of competition and elimination. The others would still remain unemployed.

Corporate companies are not charity or welfare organisations. They do not increase their intake of workers just because there are many good English speakers among the applicants.

The total number of graduates getting gainfully employed would be the same, more or less pre-determined by economic growth rate.

Of course there are some people who always argue that graduates with good command of English could always go overseas and seek employment across the global horizons.

Therefore unemployment statistics should be lower once the standard of English improves along the way. This is more of a speculative argument than real.

How many of the local graduates could measure up to world class human capital, so much so that they are keenly sought-after by overseas employers ?

Are we saying that all graduates with good command of English would automatically become the world-class human capital? Is it so simple and so straightforward to develop human capital fit for word-class competition?

In short, the local economy has got to grow at competitive rate before the job market stabilises to supply-demand equilibrium. There is no two ways about.

The right type of people must be employed to manage the economy before the local economy could expand further to create enough job opportunities for most graduates.

Putting the blame on other people will not solve any of these problems.

The more we blame the local graduates the less self-confidence they would have and finally they would retreat to their kampong without getting employed anywhere.