Too many publications to review - that's why the delay

When I read the news report in the Malaysia-Today site this morning, "Home ministry defends lengthy permit renewal", I am just amazed at the flimsy excuse given by the ministry’s Publications Control and Quranic Text secretary Datuk Zaitun Ab Samad, who said the following:

“We do not only handle the publications permits, we also handle the printing licences. We also have to study the content of the publications before granting the approvals.

“When you have more than 300 applications to go through every month, it will definitely take a while,” she said in an interview today.

She said that the ministry did not only process applications for political party organs but for all publications that required permits, including magazines, brochures, bulletins and even newsletters."

Doesn't this amount to an admission of incompetency? If you are short-handed and have many publications to review, then why issue permit on a year-to-year basis? Might as well issue permits that have a validity of two years since that is roughly when the permit status will be made known, as it is now the practice. This is totally UNACCEPTABLE for a permit to be approved or rejected, more than a year after it has expired, and then put the blame on the publishers.

For the information of Datuk Zaitun, there is a major local bank which among its many KPIs, there is one that states that each branch must clear each customer within 3 minutes, and they did it and now they are known as the fastest bank. If it takes longer than 3 minutes, do you think the manager will give an excuse to his superior, in this case the President of the bank, that his staff has too much of paper work to do. The directive from the bank's President was clear - SHAPE UP OR SHIP OUT!!!!

Our two KPI ministers, Idris Jala and Koh Tsu Koon, must issue a KPI for these fellas that all permit status must be known two weeks prior to its expiry. If they can't do their job, then get someone else who can. For starters, they have to reduce all the tea breaks, meeting breaks, toilets breaks, computer game breaks, knitting breaks, gossip breaks and instead, like Lat aptly put it, have more work breaks instead.