1Malaysia e-mail or ‘deaf mail’?
The much-hyped 1Malaysia e-mail project is touted as a means of better communications between the government and the people. Do we really need to spend RM50 million to talk to the people? If the government needs millions of e-mail addresses just to reach the people, then it hasn’t really been talking in the first place. The government controls most of the media in the country and it has dozens of government agencies already in place, each with their own communication department and helplines.
Obviously, the government departments have been inefficient and the last thing we need is another government -run agency to deal with the whole e-mail business.
Rest assured there is definitely going to be one when this project is launched. Who’s going to sift through the millions of questions sent to the government on a daily basis?
Is Pemandu or the PM’s Department going to handle all this? Say the e-mail’s administrators get an e-mail with a specific complaint or issue. What are they going to do with it?
Will the department try to answer every question, or send them to a relevant government agency?
If they are going to rope in the relevant government agencies, why couldn’t they have made these agencies more accessible to the public in the first place?
As it currently stands, most government departments aren’t very people friendly.
A couple of weeks ago, FMT asked the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) what its stance was over online attacks. If sites such as Sarawak Report and Malaysiakini could be attacked and brought down, what more ordinary business or personal sites?
MCMC’s answer was: “Can you e-mail us the questions you want to ask? Sorry, we have to get clearance from our chairman first.”
From then on it was a wild goose chase and most of the time, nobody was around to answer phone calls. And this from the MCMC’s Corporate Communications Department.
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