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Media Statement
by Lim Kit Siang  
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(Parliament, Saturday) :The Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi yesterday rebranded the 10-year-old Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) as Multimedia Super Corridor of Malaysia (MSC Malaysia) in an effort to revitalise and empower it as a national initiative to be taken to the global stage.

This rebranding cannot mask the fact that Malaysia has fallen far behind in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) development in the past 10 years, to the extent that Malaysia has become a follower instead of a leader and competitor with South Korea.

At the National ICT Business Forum in Penang last week, the Minister for Energy, Water and Communications Datuk Seri Lim Keng Yaik lamented at Malaysia’s failure to have a developed ICT industry when the  government launched MSC and the National IT Agenda in the mid-1990s and proclaimed in early 2000 that Malaysia would be transformed into a knowledge economy.

He said: “However, let us not kid ourselves. We all know how far we are from achieving this goal.  Other nations, like South Korea, started around the same time as us but we still seem to be struggling to get it right.”

In South Korea, the latest ICT target is to put a robot in every South Korean household by 2015-2020, with the head of the South Korean Ministry of Information and Communication intelligent service robot project aiming to put a robot in every home by 2010.

It is pathetic and outrageous that South Korea is talking about “one family, one robot” while  Malaysia is still  struggling with “one family, one computer” a decade after both countries had  got off a similar starting-mark in ICT development.

Keng Yaik has publicly admitted Malaysia’s failure  and conceded  the leadership role to South Korea when he said  last  year that South Korea will be the model for Malaysia’s future development of ICT.

Instead of meaningless blurbs and hypes about 10 years of MSC, it will be more productive for the government to present a White Paper in Parliament to explain why Malaysia has fallen so far behind in ICT development in the past 10 years of MSC as to become a follower instead of a leader and  competitor with South Korea and its plans to catch-up with such a serious ICT  lag in the past decade.

(08/04/2006)