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  • 1 year ago
Former Economy Minister Datuk Seri Rafizi Ramli told a public economic forum held in Kuala Lumpur on Sept 20 that many civil servants in the country are used to the culture of giving obsequious flattery remarks to their bosses and organising wasteful events as they have been taught so as a tradition.

Rafizi suggested that the public making fun of such pompous practices on social media could be one of the ways to eradicate the culture.

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Transcript
00:00We haven't started.
00:03I think any government, new government that comes in,
00:10wants to rein in the size of bureaucracy,
00:15especially the number of duplicate agencies.
00:19I think everyone will tell you that.
00:21And I know for a fact that this administration
00:24has gone through rounds and rounds of attempts
00:28to streamline, to combine.
00:33But each time you want to do it,
00:35usually because you need to shake the status quo,
00:39there's always this question about
00:40what will happen to these people.
00:43And usually the resistance is really strong
00:46because, again, for fear of offending their voters.
00:51Because if you close down one agency
00:54and there are 200 people there,
00:56they'll be out of jobs.
00:571,500 votes.
00:591,500 votes.
01:01And then even worse, if three of them
01:03actually have viral TikTok videos of that.
01:06The only difference I think, I suppose,
01:09I have with Prime Minister in the past
01:12mostly revolves around the pace and the speed.
01:17He thinks that I'm too careless and also callous
01:23in pushing for things because the...
01:27And I respect that in the sense that he's much older.
01:31After all, he is the Prime Minister, not me.
01:34I see myself as the number two in the party
01:40that has to keep on pushing
01:42so that we don't run business as usual
01:45because we do need to manage public's expectation.
01:49And you want to make sure that you achieve as much
01:52within that five years
01:53so that the change that we fought so hard for 30 years or so
01:59actually can last beyond a term.
02:02And this is something that we have to continuously hammer
02:05because it's in our culture,
02:08especially in all these programs.
02:10It also depends on minister, to be fair.
02:15Because some ministers in the past
02:18really expect that kind of grand acceptance.
02:24Again, I remember my first day reporting to work, you know.
02:28I was surprised.
02:28What the hell are you guys doing here?
02:30I was like, there's a bunch of people there.
02:32It's like, I'm just going to my office.
02:36But in the past, if ministers come,
02:40no one waits for him, he doesn't get direction,
02:43you know, that's a big scene.
02:45So, it was a culture that was built over the years.
02:51So, we have to peel it bit by bit
02:54and I hope more and more ministers
02:57and senior politicians or senior civil servants
03:00do away with a lot of these pompous
03:03and sometimes wasteful practices.
03:09And then, and I hope, you know,
03:12the senior politicians in government
03:14make it very clear that we must do away with this.
03:18Only then, I think, the culture will change.
03:21You can't blame the civil servants for doing it.
03:24Because that's how they have been taught all along
03:27and it becomes an expectation.
03:29That is their duty.
03:30If they don't do it, then you don't do your job, you know.
03:33So, and I think continuously making fun of it
03:39and highlighting it,
03:40especially now we have TikTok
03:41and make sure it's viral,
03:44then I think you get faster reaction
03:48from people in Putrajaya
03:51so that, you know,
03:52we collectively get rid of this.
03:54Then, hopefully, five, ten years down the line
03:56we see less and less of this.
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