IT is time for Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim to discontinue his predecessors’ practice of having monthly grand staff assemblies. These wasteful time-consuming gatherings are reminiscent of my weekly school assemblies of yore, except that mine were brief, with no wannabe poets as emcees torturing us with their cutesy pantun.

Watch the videos of these assemblies on social media, and the colossal waste of time and loss of productivity from work interruptions would be obvious. Imagine the many offices and public service counters left understaffed and overwhelmed during those assemblies!

Anwar’s speech on Tuesday at the Finance Ministry was illustrative. While he was mercifully brief (about twenty minutes), the long preamble together with the obligatory Quran recitation and pantun reading made the event last over an hour. Add the inevitable social chatter before and after, and the colossal waste of time would be obvious.

The emcee proudly announced that there were over 700 staff members present. You can bet that they were not lowly-paid timescale keranis but lavishly remunerated departmental heads and other “superscale” officers.

Anwar did not reveal anything new in his speech, nothing that he had not uttered umpteen times before and elsewhere. That is, the importance of combating corruption and rationalising subsidies. Those should not be news to his staff, nor do they need to be inspired. Instead, they should inspire the public through their examples. Attending those useless assemblies on government time is far from that.

I am not against pep talks and rah-rah rallies to inspire the troops, but it should not happen at taxpayers’ expense. If done on company time, make sure that it would benefit the organisation. A classic example of that was Apple’s Steve Jobs showcasing a new product. He used those occasions not only to praise and inspire his employees but also to garner millions worth of publicity and precious advertising as well as create buzz among techies.

Anwar is a masterful orator and has an important message to deliver. His target audience, however, should not be his staff but the general public. His staff should support him in that crusade by themselves being exemplary public servants.

Unlike him, Anwar’s ministers are not so blessed oratory-wise. I watched a recent Ministry of Education (MOE) assembly where its civil servant head instead of the minister addressed the gathering. He droned on for over an hour discussing mundane issues such as staff evaluations! He could have saved everybody’s time and resources by simply issuing mass e-mails or newsletters.

Of even greater significance, he said nothing about MOE’s current initiative, announced only a few days earlier, of seeking public input for its forthcoming massive review of the education policy.

A month earlier the minister herself addressed the staff. While she did not outdo her civil service head in speech length, hers was still long enough, more than twice that of Anwar. In her half-English, half-Malay with gratuitous sprinkling of Arabic (par for the course for Malays these days), she devoted a significant portion of her talk to how much she learned from Stephen Covey’s book on trust. As for her listeners’ attention, the only applause she received was when she announced salary increases!

Dispense with these wasteful monthly assemblies. Emulate our first prime minister Tunku Abdul Rahman. He used to have a weekly formal press conference following his cabinet meeting where a particular minister (whose issues were the subject of earlier deliberations) was at his side to elaborate.

Those were also occasions to showcase a minister’s talent as well as inform the public of major initiatives. Last week would have been an opportune time for Anwar to have the education minister at his side to discuss the proposed education review.

These regular press conferences would also preempt the current frenzy of Anwar’s ministers rushing to the nearest microphone at the slightest provocation to comment on some trivial matter when they should be busy quietly doing their work. Let your results do the talking. Those grand assemblies are nothing more than officially sanctioned excuses for officers not to be at their desks. Nothing said by those ministers that could not be communicated more effectively, efficiently, and at a much lower cost through e-mails or newsletters.

Anwar’s oratorical skills notwithstanding, he too should avoid frequent public appearances. Those are taxing in so many ways, more so for us in the geriatric group. Focus on a few critical issues. Results and successes would speak volumes and trump eloquent speeches every time. Let us ponder the fate of that master orator Sukarno who was so intoxicated with his soaring rhetoric, or the leader Nong in Shannon Ahmad’s short story “Ungkapan” (sloganeering), consumed with his endless political jingles.

More to the point, ministers should be the chief executives of their respective ministries, not their cheerleaders or press release officers. – July 9, 2024. 

* Bakri Musa 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.