Privatisation trend and its effects

By the end of the year 2009, we, as a whole society of our beloved country of Malaysia, will have to endure and experience the many negative implications regarding our two most important social needs of our modern day, the sources of power, the electricity and the modes of public transportations, as a result of continuous, significant rises of the charges that we have to pay.

It is very disheartening for me, personally, as I am an avid user of public transportations. I know that these moves will greatly affect the lower and middle income groups that we must bear and endure the daily economical burdens. It is a very pessimistic and backwards move by the government ever, in increasing and promoting the usages of public transportations.

The moves to an almost annual hike of public commodities have left me, sometimes with anger and impractical consequences to the government’s inability in managing our country wealth and revenues, resulting in many high profiles cases of corruption and graft, totaling up to billions of our money being wasted. The same lame excuses were being used to justify the capitalistic moves in diverting the actual needs of our society.

One of the main excuses that we are force to swallow is that the services provider experience losses. It is so untrue, as for an example, the intercity train services, Keretapi Tanah Melayu Berhad(KTMBH), is the services manipulator of our daily public transportation. One of the questions that I want to raise is how and why, the ability and capability of the train services can be upgrade to a better standard when it is so salient and remarkable that the services and managements are deteriorating from day to day?

It is the roots of the problems that we must first, be able to understand and tackle to ensure the needs of the society to be a priority. I believe that the actual roots of the problems we have to face today, is a result of privatization trends of public needs, such as the power supply(water, electricity) and public transportations(trains, buses) in our government economic policies. I am never against these kinds of moves, as it is proven that, it will help to enhance healthy competitions and services, but, here in Malaysia, it is being used as a tool of manipulations to satisfy the capitalisms agendas. The affiliations of the certain companies to political entities are a real disaster in providing the basic needs of our modern day lives. It will leads to many exposed negatives implications and measures such as nepotisms, cronyisms that will lead to incompetence services.

It is a very serious measure that we must take into account as we are living in a very vulnerable region, exposed to many kinds of dangerous elements of terrorism and instability. The ability to understand these situations will help us to prioritize our plan and organize our people centric agendas in providing the basic commodities without any interruptions and negative consequences. It is very clear, that most of the recent continuous hikes of prices regarding our public services have profitable motive. I have a fear for them, and doubt towards their readiness of making a sacrifices especially when there are uncertainties struck our beloved country, as clearly, the companies that responsible in providing the public services, are more attracted to make profit, rather than improving their services.

It is very obvious, that we become highly dependent to the privatization trends, that we, becoming less aware to the facts that it is a very serious measures especially when, all of our public related commodities are being manipulated to certain quarters without any serious interventions and relations of our government in making any concrete stands regarding the citizen’s welfare.

I am urging and hoping that the government can seriously considering and reviewing the trend of making the public related services an easy target to satisfy the hunger of capitalisms. It is time, for us to show and understand the reality in instilling awareness of our Malaysian citizens, in demanding better service to achieve what we really deserves.