LETTER | Time to let NPC go

LETTER | Gerak is very concerned with the latest Auditor-General Report. As with many past reports, it provides us with a litany of financial mismanagement, abuse and cases of outright dishonesty by individuals and public organisations/institutions. This is disappointing.

Like many times before, the public has expressed shock, disbelief and anger at this list of misspending by those entrusted with spending public (read: the rakyat’s) money.

However, Gerak will not attempt to comment on all these misdeeds. Instead, there is one higher education-related issue that enjoins our organisation to comment.

The existence of the National Professors Council (NPC) is an issue that the various media platforms have been consistently addressing. It has been brought up several times in Parliament as well.

As such, Gerak is compelled to question the validity of the NPC. It was set up in 2010, purportedly to provide academic “expertise” to help the then-BN government with its “development agenda”. To some, this essentially meant that the NPC was set up to support and academically legitimise BN policies.

Many, including Gerak, did not see the purpose in providing NPC with public funding amounting to millions of ringgit over the years, for the questionable output they provided.

Indeed, when the Pakatan Harapan government came to power in 2018 with an agenda for reform, Gerak immediately submitted a 10-point proposal to the new education minister.

Item 7 of the Gerak memorandum had called for the dissolution of the NPC.

We further stated that “NPC has been beholden to the powers that be and not to the search for truth or the creation of knowledge. Hence it should be dissolved immediately”.

Misuse of funds

Gerak’s stance is that all academics should have the freedom to engage with any authority, whether the government, civil society organisations, corporations, or any other individuals/groups without the need to belong to or go through a council like the NPC.

Be that as it may, NPC indeed was disbanded as a government-funded organisation in 2018 and existed as an independently run entity. Strangely though, it was placed under the purview of the Prime Minister’s Office, until the unelected government under Ismail Sabri Yaakob started refunding it in 2022 while still under the PMO.

The issue being highlighted now is principally NPC’s misuse of funds which the report has revealed, and which one MP has been quoted as saying, “We had high hopes in NPC but are disappointed by this (misuse of funds),” in the Dewan Rakyat while debating the report recently.

The federal territories minister said studies are being conducted. Gerak agrees, of course, that such financial mismanagement must be addressed, and the wrongdoers held accountable. But we do wonder what more studies need to be done, given the detailed figures and problematic activities that have already been clearly outlined in the audit report.

In monetary terms, the report states that the NPC received government grants totalling RM35.84 million from 2015 to 2018 and from 2022 to 2023. That works out to an estimated whopping RM6 million per year for six years.

Beyond all the financial hijinks revealed by the report, however, Gerak’s stand - now as in 2018 - is that the NPC is irrelevant for Malaysian academe and the nation.

Gerak would like to ask the following:

• How has the NPC been leading the country in national thinking and solutions to socio-cultural crises?

• Where is the evidence that the NPC is a bastion of active, relevant and "critically and independent-minded" intellectuals, contributing positively to the nation's material, psychological, and spiritual development?

• How has the NPC created a sense of identity and patriotism, as well as more plural cohesiveness in our society? Where is the evidence?

• How have the members of the NPC critiqued the state constructively and have they been able to expose leadership's transgressions constructively?

• Can the NPC boast of a large community of public intellectuals among themselves?

Without clear evidence, the NPC seems to be merely a hierarchical entity which reinforces patronage and cronyism. It tags itself as “Pemikir Negara” (the nation’s thinkers) but has little or nothing to do with national thinking and neither is it a bastion of contributing intellectuals for nation-building.

Thus, Gerak opines that it is time to let the NPC go (again), this time without the impulse to park it under any ministry or government office.

These professors are financially equipped and wise enough to take care of themselves without expensive taxpayers’ crutches to hold them and their breeches up.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.