Tun Dr Mahathir calls it Shared Prosperity Vision 2030; I call it Special Purpose Vehicle 2030.
Be it ‘vision’ or ‘vehicle’, both come down to SPV 2030, but while one is a pipe dream the other is a slick way of playing with gullible Malaysians.
As a ‘vision’, SPV 2030 seems to take for granted that rich and powerful Malaysians will share their wealth with their poorer and less privileged countrymen.
How is that going to happen? I would believe it if all those well-to-do children of the prime minister show the way and the simple meaning of sharing.
But it is just another pipe dream, as was Vision 2020 — hardly two months left of its shelf-life — that has brought Malaysia to near political and economic disaster.
Vision 2020 has failed to achieve anything but polarisation across the board. Eighty-three days to go, as I write this, Malaysia is nowhere near to becoming a developed nation.
Vision 2020 was Dr Mahathir’s 1999 brainchild but he blamed the previous government for its failure saying, “for the last 15 years, wrong strategies and policies were emphasised”.
What strategies would have made Vision 2020 successful — the crooked bridge? More Twin Towers and Cyberjaya? Sell those national assets?
But Vision 2020 is just another economic policy among the series of New Economic Policy (NEP) written and re-written each time the policy failed to achieve its objectives.
The NEP failed. Vision 2020 failed. The education policy failed. The Look East policy failed. PH election manifesto was a political deception of the highest order.
In Dr Mahathir own words: “We (PH) thought we were going to lose. We put in tough things in the manifesto so that if we lose, the (BN) government would be in a quandary (after winning the polls).”
“We are victims of our own manifesto,” said Dr Mahathir — to which someone wrote: “Wrong. You are no victim.
“What our Prime Minister truly is, is a perpetrator, one who has admitted to making empty promises to vulnerable people, only to spit in the face of those whose trust he gained after a ‘miraculous’ victory.
“It is difficult to wrap your head around what kind of person and what kind of party could come up with this strategy — making up a bunch of puffed up promises with no practical direction of achieving their said goals.”
After GE14, what has become clearer is that this federation is failing. Why would I believe SPV 2030 the ‘vision’ will be different?
Dr Mahathir said it will be better because “everyone will enjoy prosperity”.
It will focus on the aspects of training rather than merely ‘giving’, especially to the poor.
“We will select those who are keen and passionate enough to improve themselves … these people will be assisted.
“If they don’t have experience, knowledge and idea on how to do it, we will train them.”
The prime minister said the poor did not understand the importance of financial management and always think that money is merely a means to purchase rather than as a business capital.
“We will also introduce small-scale businesses which they can manage and I am confident that this time around, they will get better results.”
Have we not done all that before? Weren’t all these spelt out in all those economic policies that had come and gone? The small-scale businesses he is talking about, aren’t they the thrust of those policies designed for the SMEs and SMIs?
What’s new? Nothing!
I don’t believe in Shared Prosperity because to me as a Sarawakian, it is the extraction of the state’s oil and gas by the millions of litres for pittance — a total of RM660 billion worth of oil and oil products between 1976 and 2018 for just RM33 billion.
Someone was saying: “Say a fella borrows from you RM10 and says he will return it to you in a weeks time. Come next week, instead of returning the RM10, he says, he can’t return it to you now, all he has is just RM2, because he is now in a ‘difficult’ position, and starts telling you one long story filled with holes on one end and misplaced decimal points on the other end, about how he not only wanted to return your RM10, but RM15, but then somebody stole it, so now all he has is RM2, before finishing by saying, but don’t worry, if you borrow me RM20 right now, I will return the RM30 plus another 20 by 2030.”
That’s why I call it Special Purpose Vehicle 2030. It’s a vehicle that PH is riding on to GE15, as with its GE14 manifesto, SPV 2030 is just another pack of lies.
It’s one grandiosely written piece of mother of all promises that its designer will not have to answer to six years from now.
