MALAYSIA cannot seem to end her love affair with five-year-plans.

She is now in her 12th (2021 to 2025) Malaysia Plan (MP).

Policymakers and civil servants are now undoubtedly consumed with endless meetings for the Plan’s upcoming Mid-Term Review.

That done they will again be distracted with having to hatch the next (13th) plan.

What would it take to disabuse the government of its continuing folly with rigid five-year plans?

As a young surgeon in Johor Bharu back in the late 1970s, my colleagues and I were often taken away from our clinical duties because of endless meetings for the mid-term review of the 5th MP.

Just as I thought it was over, a few months later we were back with another series of meetings, this time to plan for the upcoming 6th MP.

I did not endear myself to my superiors when I simply wrote: “Finish incomplete projects of previous plans.”

The socialistic whiff of five-year plans aside, I am not enamoured with central planning.

There are just too many unknown variables, local and global, to contend.

The 7th MP was upended midway by the 1997 Asian Economic Crisis.

Even the Russians had abandoned their five-year plans, their last being the 12th that ended in 1990.

One has to be insular, if not ignorant, not to realise that none of the developed nations have five-year plans.

Singapore does not and is doing very well, that should tell us something.

There is nothing magical about five years. With digital technology, that would be equivalent to a generation if not a century.

Consider the smartphones of today. A few years back there were only landlines and they were scarce.

With educational policies, on the other hand, you want stability. The span of a generation would be more appropriate.

You cannot, for example, teach STEM subjects in English and then a few years later switch to Bahasa Malaysia to pander to the language nationalists.

Such pandering carries a severe price to be paid by future generations.

The consequent damages would also be difficult to undo.

On the other hand, with trade, fiscal and monetary policies a period of a decade or longer would be more appropriate.

Consider Canada’s Office of Superintendent of Financial Institutions, responsible for regulating banks and other financial entities.

This year it “made the most significant revision of their supervisory framework in a quarter of a century”. That is stability.

It is not surprising that Canada breezed through the 2008 housing crisis without so much as a sneeze while many American banks and other financial institutions had to be bailed out.

It would make more sense to have sectoral plans with variable time spans.

Intuitively we can appreciate the need for different time durations for different institutions.

Instead of defining policy duration in years, have short-term, intermediate and long-term plans instead.

For an academic department, the short term would be to survive the semester or year, the intermediate term would be to recruit strong faculty. That would take a few years.

For the long term, it would be to establish a solid research unit, which would take a decade or longer.

Each sector requires not only different periods but also smart and differing allocation of resources, personnel and strategic thinking.

For the current administration, doing away with corruption should be the top priority.

Ending direct negotiations and opening all tenders to competitive bidding should be the immediate goal. That is achievable within a year or two.

Then in the intermediate term (three to five years), to strengthen the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission by recruiting seasoned hands.

The long term would be institutional reforms and new laws, including making Malaysians declare their worldwide assets and incomes, and pay taxes on them.

For education, the short-term goal, which is immediately implementable, would be to devote more school hours to English and STEM subjects. The intermediate term (within a few years) would be to establish an exclusively English-medium teachers’ college while in the long term, to make Malaysians bilingual in Malay and English.

That goal would take at least a decade to accomplish.

Such an approach would make one recognise and prepare for the inevitable complexities of the real world and with that, the necessity of tailoring policies accordingly instead of being bound by self-imposed rigid and unnecessary five-year strictures.

Comments: letters@thesundaily.com