In The Minds of Young Malaysians

As the Central Committee Member of a youth organization, Young Malaysians Movement (YMM), one of the main concern is in the area of youth development.

It is notable that there’s no special development and development programme targeted at youth below the age of 15 years old which is actually contributing to the largest number of school dropouts.

It is adequate to raise the attention of the authority that the RMK9 is silenced on the number of school dropouts at primary and lower secondary levels and strategies to accommodate these dropouts since most of them do not have the minimum requirement required to pursue vocational and technical courses.

The reason to care for this group is that, according to experience, as this group of youth are the left behinds, and if not being addressed, they would not be able to get any help from the government to have decent surviving place in the main stream community and would soon be swallowed by the “community in the dark” – the criminal world. It is already getting common to see that the age of criminals are getting younger by the year.

The followings would be observed in the budget of RMK9:

• Economy: increase from 38.5% to 44.9%
• Security: increase from 2.8% to 3%
  
• Social: fall from 40.8% to 37.5%
• Security: fall from 13% to 10.6%
• General Administration: 7.7% to 6.9%

The RMK9 has a higher emphasis on economic growth.

The development budget allocationed for security has increased marginally as a proportion of the total budget compared to RMK8, though public security is the main concern of the people at this moment of time.

Total budget for education and training has dropped from 25.7% in the RMK8 to 20.6% in the RMK9. This is a better indication on that the plan is about rather than what we were told, that our focus is to create a knowledge society and a skilled based workforce. Bread and Butter would proof to be more important after all.