The cycle of despair

By Ken Vin Lek and G Vinod - Free Malaysia Today,


FMT FOCUS PETALING JAYA: With 10 years to go before Malaysia becomes a developed nation, life for the urban poor has remained the same as it was when Dr Mahathir Mohamad announced Vision 2020 nearly 20 years ago.
They continue to struggle for their daily bread and to suffer the heartbreak of knowing that life will not get any better for their children because there is not enough money to educate them.
A FMT team recently did a Najib-style walkabout of Petaling Jaya to see how differently the poor and the rich lived and to talk to some from each group.
The story of a factory worker can serve as the typical narrative of a poor urban dweller. Having little or no education, he could not choose his job; the job chose him. He started in 1981 with a salary of RM200. A couple of years later, he got married, and soon the children started coming until there were four.
Now, 30 years later, the salary has about tripled—to RM650. He has no savings after working hard all of his adult life. There is a hefty bill for his recent heart bypass surgery and he has no idea how to find the money to settle it. He cannot depend on his children; they have not been able to find jobs because of their limited education.
Amalina Sufian, 21 years old and an employee of a local convenience store, has had no chance to pursue a tertiary education because she needs to make a living. She now earns RM800 a month, more than a third of which goes to groceries.
On the other hand, Nathan Periasamy, 20-years-old and the son of a wealthy businessman, is pursuing medicine at a prestigious university in Britain. He has never had to sweat it out for money. His father pays for his expenses, which sometimes amount to RM3,000 a month.
Amalina and Nathan studied equally hard in school. The difference is that Amalina had no money and was therefore deprived of the opportunities open to Nathan.
Over the years, our government has been announcing consistent increases in our per capita GDP and congratulating itself. The current figure is RM24,661. But FMT talked to taxi drivers, hawkers and security guards in Petaling Jaya Selatan and found that they make hardly a third of that amount.
Surprisingly, in 2009, the United Nations Development Programme reported that the incidence of poverty in Malaysia stood at an estimated 3.8 percent.
The government sets the poverty line at RM500 per month for a family of four. Anyone who knows anything about the cost of living knows that this is outrageously unrealistic. The rental for a three-room apartment in the poorer sections of Petaling Jaya, for instance, can be as high RM1,000 a month. That is about 60 percent of the monthly income of many of the residents interviewed by FMT.
A group of factory workers suggested that in order to just survive, a household would require a monthly income of RM1,750.
What would you pay for a shirt?
We did a random survey in Kuala Lumpur to find out how much a person was willing to spend for a new shirt.
There were dramatic differences in the figures given by people of different levels of income. A middle-income earner would pay nearly twice the amount a low-income earner would pay, but a high-income earner would pay about three times the middle-income earner would.
Ramasamy Periasamy, a 74-year-old florist, said he would pay at most RM10 for a shirt because what he earned was not even enough for him to survive for a month.
“I earn about RM350 a month by selling flowers,” he said. “Of course I get some money from my children, but I definitely have to be thrifty and cannot buy unecessary items.”
Malaysia and Singapore have the worst Gini Coefficient (a measure of wealth inequality) in Asean. Malaysia’s Gini is 46:1 and Singapore’s is 48.1.
According to the World Bank, the highest 10 percent of income earners in Malaysia hold 37.9 percent of the country’s wealth while the bottom 10 percent hold a meagre 1.8 percent.
Malaysia’s Department of Statistics reports that more than half of Malaysian households earn a monthly income of less than RM3,000.
When it comes to savings, the average person with a high income would save close to RM12,000 a month compared to a meagre RM200 for lower income earners.
Lee Boon Chai, 54, is employed as the general manager of a company and takes home about RM25,000 a month. He sends his child to a private school for RM12,000 a year, enrols him for tennis lessons costing RM300 a week and pays for his entertainment expenses. Lee saves about RM5,000 a month.
In comparison, Tan Heng Meng, a 46-year-old school teacher, gets only RM2,800 per month and has to take on the extra job of food catering to earn enough for her family of seven.
“Life has not been easy,” she said. “I have three children and two parents to look after. My pay has not gone up much since I started working in 1983.
“When times were better, I could afford to send my two daughters for piano lessons, but as it stands now, I cannot even pay for a quality tertiary education for my child even though she received an offer from King’s College in London to pursue law.”
MP for Petaling Jaya Utara, Tony Pua, has pointed out that poverty no longer exists in one race only and measures taken to fight poverty should transcend race and focus on the lowest income earners.
“The gap between the rich and poor within the bumiputra race has widened over the years even though the New Economic Policy was meant to do the exact opposite,” he said.
Stamping out poverty has been a key agenda in almost every economic model presented by the Malaysian government since independence from Britain. The recently announced 10th Malaysia Plan addresses the need to improve the quality of life for the poorest 40 percent of Malaysians.
Pua called for measures to ensure that funds meant to help the poor do not fall into the wrong hands as has happened in previous administrations.