Inter-Research And Studies (IRAS)

This article has earlier appeared in Beritadaily.com on 14/4/2017 Clarification from Putrajaya is urgently required! Is the Prime Minister’s Department (PMD) taking precedence over the education sector, to the extent that budgets for public universities and related sectors were slashed. Does Putrajaya now regard education as of lower priority for our younger generation today? Party politics and the politics of survival have apparently become an important task for Putrajaya, particularly the PMD itself. When we complain of low productivity and a bloated civil service of about 1.68 million employees, the leadership in Putrajaya decided to slash the budgets for public universities instead without considering the consequences to the coming generations. A source has been reported as saying that the budget cuts of public universities were some sort of “punishment” because many students and academics had been voicing out against policies and systems of the government. If this is the case, ...

This article has earlier appeared in the Beritadaily.com on 27/1/2017 The scandal surrounding the state-owned 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) and the case of a RM2.6 billion deposit found in the personal account of Prime Minister Najib Razak have not only become local headlines but have also gained international attention. This is because this nation has become Umno’s Malaysia where everyone must say yes and bow respectfully to the Umno president. Our nation’s three major organs – the executives, parliament and the judiciary system – are all right under his thumb. This is why he managed to bulldoze through many oppressive laws for use against his critics and opponents in order to stay in power. In Malaysia, the position of the prime minister has become too powerful. Checks and balances on him are currently non-existent because the institutions themselves have made him so. As for our parliamentary system, no doubt there are some checks and balances on matters pertaining to govern...

This article has earlier appeared in Beritadaily.com on 14/3/2016 The government has decided that the outcome of the 1MDB probe will be kept under the Official Secrets Act (OSA) to prevent leakages, at least until it is tabled in parliament. So, why is the government hiding 1MDB under the OSA? In the course of the investigation, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) had promised a thorough probe into every single detail in the 1MDB controversy to determine what went wrong in its asset acquisition activities which had resulted in debts of RM42 billion. When 1MDB’s RM42 billion scandal was first exposed, there were lots of speculations and guessing game as the government refused to reveal what had actually gone wrong in these deals. The government also took months to initiate its internal investigation, and the PAC’s probe too was abruptly put to a standstill on various occasions. In between, we saw the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) being raided, followed by the detention of...