The move and commitment by Home Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin to improve the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) to expedite the process of granting citizenship is welcomed with much optimism and goodwill as the backlog of citizenship applications for children, senior applicants, foreign spouses and adopted children has been dragging for way too long.
A visit to the department that processes citizenship applications and entry permits in the Home Ministry in Putrajaya will see many senior persons and children, on their umpteenth time applying and waiting for years and decades to be granted citizenship as a Malaysian.
While the Federal Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, provides for numerous articles that grants citizenship to diverse forms of applications, but the red tapes, bureaucratic dramas, prolonged silences from departments, inexplicable rejections without any advice given, intra-department and inter-department incommunicado and inefficient, ineffective working cultures, all have become recipes in a lethal potent contributing to crippled attempts for a Malaysian citizenship.
Last week, I had proposed in the Dewan Rakyat for the Home Ministry to launch an audit into investigating the root cause of a huge backlog in citizenship applications, particularly for children who were born in Malaysia and born overseas, who have been waiting for years and years, children in orphanages, children born to foreign spouses (in the country and overseas), for foreign spouses in general and also for senior applications, who were born in Malaya and those who came to Malaya decades ago, whose children are now citizens and they are still stuck in a limbo.
In addition to that I had also called for a Standard Operating Procedure to be used by all officers in all states as some of the issues that had been highlighted to me by lawyers handling citizenship applications for children found that when the “same” set of applications had been submitted to 2 different National Registration Departments in different states, the reactions and response were vastly different and at this juncture, one application appears to be moving successfully while the other is sadly stagnant. This is a clear situation of why an SOP, a KPI and an audit is needed to be adhered to.
Gone are the BN ‘glory days’ where “Minister-knows-best” which, in its own right, a diabolical SOP used by Barisan Nasional which had left to hundreds of thousands of applicants left wandering aimlessly in the dark.
A good set of new SOPs will be meaningless if it is not cemented by strict Key Performance Indicators (KPI) set by the Home Ministry in place to enable officers and departments to perform better in processing these applications. The KPI must then be audited to examine where the real bottleneck exists and to take speedy measures to overcome them.
As legislators and lawmakers, as Malaysians, we are all in agreement that the highest award one can receive in a sovereign nation like ours is to be awarded the precious and priceless title as a “MALAYSIAN” citizen, where one can call a home, a place to serve, defend, honour – and a place for one’s final rest, it is also evidently undeniable that the Pakatan Harapan Government has today inherited systemic, long standing, mammoth issues that went unresolved by a 60 year old Barisan Nasional regime, including the vocation of granting citizenship.
It is truly an uphill task to undo the devilry of Barisan Nasional after 6 decades in less than a year, particularly in the pivotal business of statelessness in Malaysia, and this will certainly triumph with the essential political determination by the Home Ministry and the Cabinet as a whole, twinned with a display of accountability, integrity and respecting the rule of law our nation, and long standing citizenship issues will be a thing of the past.