Public Can Soon Apply For Funds To Repair Potholes And Drains

Have you ever dreamt of being in the construction industry while growing up? But life’s circumstances threw a curve-ball and you ended up becoming a doctor or an engineer. Well fret not, now you can reboot those dreams as the Ministry of Economic Affairs is looking to “empower” the general public to fix our nation's potholes and drainage issues.

According to the Minister of Economy, Rafizi Ramli, members of the public who would like to undertake these “construction” projects can directly apply for allocations within the next two to three weeks as the ministry is already finalising project applications procedures. This was announced during the Mid-Term Review of the 12th Malaysia Plan by said ministry.

Rafizi further notes that once the system is running, members of the public would no longer be weighed down with layers of red-tape bureaucracy that’s very time-consuming, even for a simple approval.

With this we are also able to understand that the government is turning to the general public to chime in on development proposals which could eventually be matched with what has been planned by the relevant departments. Maybe this would be one way to improve the system and perhaps rid it of dead weights in the government sectors that are not contributing to the nation's development.

Social activist, Lando Zawawi and his team has been actively patching potholes for public safety (PIC: Lando Zawawi)

We will first start with small projects as usually they are not planned by the government, but the existence of these projects are only known to the assemblymen,” added Rafizi further. However, he also states that all applications by the public would still go through proper processes that involve the district offices and other relevant parties.

With the system in place, hopefully it would aid the assemblymen as all applications can now be directly submitted to the Economy Ministry. This, however, begs the question as to why do we need a high number of assemblymen moving forward when the general public is required to deal directly with the relevant ministries in future?