A CORPORATE entity recently held a town hall session for its shareholders and employees. The chief executive officer of the company stood up to address them.

“Times have been hard and we appreciate all the hard work and sacrifices you have made,” he said. The crowd remained quiet and listless.

“We have big plans,” he said. “Great plans, in fact, to bring this company back to its glory days!

“We have broken this plan down into four phases. In Phase One, we will make a profit of RM40 million.

“By the end of Phase Two, the company will be on the road to recovery and we target RM60 million.”

The crowd was getting excited now and applause filled the room.

The CEO smiled and carried on. “By the Third Phase, we will show a profit of RM100 million and we will sustain our efforts and show a huge improvement to RM100 million by the end of Phase Four.”

The crowd stood up and gave the CEO a standing ovation. He nodded and smiled around smugly. As the applause died down, someone raised her hand.

“Yes? You have a question?” asked the CEO.

A youngish-looking woman stood up. “Sir, if I may,” she said. “Exactly how are we going to achieve those profits? What are the plans to make them work and what are the timelines? Are there any contingency plans to mitigate if they don’t work our as planned?”

A quiet murmur went around the room and all heads turned to the CEO expectantly. He looked around at his senior staff, obviously a little uncomfortable. “Errr… yes, good question. We have four phases and that is how we will achieve the profits,” he said.

Emboldened by the young woman asking this very striking question, and not getting a satisfactory answer from the CEO, another shareholder stood up. “Sir, we have been suffering for more than a year,” he said.

“Our financial situation seems to be worsening or, at best, stagnating. Yet, your four-phase approach doesn’t seem to have any new ideas or any concrete actions. What exactly are the plans? How will we do this?”

A rumble of discontent filled the room as the realisation began to sink in that the leadership seemed clueless. The CEO looked around again. “What don’t you understand? That is the plan! The plan is as I have outlined! What is there not to understand?” he retorted.

Sounds familiar? While the story above is fictitious, just replace the corporate entity with our country.

Substitute the CEO with the government of the day. Swap financial situation with the current Covid-19 situation and this story takes on a whole new meaning.

Enough has been said by different experts and even the layman about taking a more targeted approach. About the need for better plans. About using holistic data and drilled-down statistics rather than just absolute numbers. Sadly, we just seem to hear and be subjected to the same modus operandi with the wheel being reinvented the same time.

The latest news is that hard numbers are going to be used to determine which phase of the lockdown we will be subjected to. These numbers are based on the number of daily infections, the capacity or utilisation of intensive care units and the percentage of population fully vaccinated.

The foolishness of this is that absolute numbers or percentages nationwide are being used. In my humble opinion, it would make more sense to have location-based numbers and perhaps on a per capita basis as surely higher populated areas/states would have higher numbers. This should be done for all three criteria. Using nationwide numbers is not a targeted approach and basically, skews the data.

But all this has been said before.

And surely using full vaccination as a criterion undermines the effect that even a partial vaccination has. Some studies show that even the first dose affords some form of protection against the virus. One of the numbers that need to be reached to move to Phase 2 is that 10% of the population needs to have received both doses of the vaccine.

At the rate we are going, Phase 2 is going to be hard to reach as looking at the latest numbers on the Vaksincovid website, (https://www.vaksincovid.gov.my/en/statistics/), it appears that only 16 million people have registered while just over five million have received the first dosage.

So, based on a population of 32 million, the government expects to only move into Phase 2 once 3.2 million people have received both doses of the vaccine?

I shudder to think how long this is going to take, based on the current rollout. Perhaps there is a plan to accelerate this, but no one seems to be sharing it.

Why not create a daily dashboard to show full vaccinations so people have a better idea. If this is already in place, I apologise for not knowing about it.

At the same time, it shows that communication is not being carried out effectively.

Speaking of communication, the government has now come out with a new acronym, NRP, for national recovery plan, and insists on claiming that we are in Phase 1.

While we may, in fact, be in Phase 1 of the NRP, the truth of the matter is that we have been at this for more than a year and gone through so many phases.

Referring to it as Phase 1, is to me, simply trying to pull wool over our eyes and make it seem as if we are at the initial phase of the pandemic.

So we, the rakyat, just stay at home and wait with bated breath for the next announcement and possibly new acronym to be revealed.

I think, though, that I speak for the rakyat as a whole when I say that we are tired, frustrated and fed up, to say the least.

We are also struggling – financially, mentally and physically.

All we are really asking for are concrete plans and actions with clear timelines and plans to address these should those actions not come to fruition.

Much like the corporate example above, the rakyat are the shareholders and the government is the company the shareholders have invested in. You are answerable to us. But all this has been said before, many times by many people, but that will not stop me from saying it again. Even if I may sound like a broken record.

For now, all we have is the NRP and that to me, just seems to stand for No Real Plan. – June 27, 2021.

* Dharm Navaratnam reads The Malaysian Insight.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.