PUTRAJAYA: Chief secretary to the government Zuki Ali has urged heads of government departments to “go to the ground” to understand the people’s issues instead of just staying in their offices.
Zuki urged civil servants to emulate Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, pointing out that he would go for Friday prayers and have lunch with the people every week in various parts of the country.
“As department heads, I think we can follow his example to go down to the ground and see for ourselves what the people are going through.
“We would then be better able to understand their problems,” he said in his annual address to civil servants at the public services department’s (JPA) auditorium here.
Zuki expressed concern that senior civil servants would not be able to make decisions that could benefit the people if they did not understand the real issues that regular Malaysians were struggling with.
“Sometimes, we only make our decisions from the office, based on the proposal papers given by our officers,” he said.
Zuki also lamented how Malaysia had dropped down in Transparency International’s annual corruption perception index (CPI) score, saying this reflected badly on civil servants.
He said Putrajaya needed to put mechanisms in place to ensure greater accountability and transparency, thus improving the nation’s score in next year’s CPI.
“It is our responsibility to ensure our CPI performance improves to uplift the nation’s image.”
Malaysia has dropped six points in the annual CPI over the past three years, notching a score of 47 in the 2022 index.
In 2019, Malaysia had a CPI score of 53, but this dropped to 51 in 2020 and 48 in 2021.
Transparency International Malaysia president Muhammad Mohan had said Malaysia was essentially back to square one in the CPI despite the improvements it saw after the 2018 general election.
