Walk the manifesto talk, politicians urged

Whichever political coalition forms the next government after the 13th General Election should ensure that the pledges made in manifestos are implemented sincerely.

This is the call from the Federation of Malaysian Consumers Associations (FOMCA) which recently released its own version ‘manifesto rakyat’ to represent the wishlist of consumers.

FOMCA secretary-general Datuk Paul Selva Raj said that both manifestos of Barisan Nasional (BN) and Pakatan Rakyat (PR) has generally managed to touch on the issues that FOMCA has brought up.

“From food security, public transport to crime. These are things included in their manifestos, but we want both parties to declare in more detail what they will do to address these issues, flesh them out, and give priority to good governance and sincere implementation,” Paul told Astro Awani.

“At the very minimum they should fulfill what they stated in the manifestos. When it comes to election, a lot of people say a lot of things, that’s good. But goodwill alone and trust is not good enough, we need NGOs and consumers to pressure the government to live up to what they promise,” he said.

Asked about the items that were not spelled out clearly in either manifestos, Paul said that FOMCA wants greater space when it comes to interaction with civil society.

“We need to be given space and have more engagement so that we can continuously help them by giving an honest and crital look at weaknesses,” he said.

Paul said civil society needs the government’s support, including financial, so that the country can build strong partners in development in the form of NGOs.

However, Paul admitted that the current government has been giving priority to consultation, and it was a positive trend. “We hope this trend would continue, but we don’t want to be given token representation. ‘Tokenism’ does not equal real engagement, taking our views seriously in policy making,” he said.

On another matter, Paul said that consumers need greater protection and the government is heading in the right direction by having Competition Act 2010.

“We still have a lot of anti competitive behaviour happening in the market. This has to be addressed. The instrument is there, it has the potential to make a very powerful impact on economy by removing cartels of any kind so that we can have a free market. Anti-competition practices must be removed in all forms, from all agencies,” he said.

Regulators of certain sectors, including telecommunications, should also do more to protect the consumers.

“The Malaysian Communication and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) was in the past been not effecting, but in the past months we feel they have been responding and taking more actions,” he said, adding that Bank Negara was an example of comparatively firm regulator.

“This is because with systemic issues, only the authorities can act. We can only help individual cases to a certain extent,” he said.