MeCD is dead, long live MeCD

Categorized | News

Posted on 28 April 2009 by Daniel CerVentus

There is a new reign in Malaysia. Najib is now the new Prime Minister and he has his own ideas how to shape Malaysia.

So when it came to his new cabinet, Najib decided that the Kementerian Pembangunan Ushawan dan Koperasi otherwise known MeCD is no longer relevant as a stand alone ministry.

Najib moved most of the responsibilities and its agencies directly under the Prime Minister department.
Its former minister Noh bin Haji Omar has taken over as the Minister Of Agriculture and Agro-based Industries and GEW Malaysia patron and former MeCD deputy miniter, Saifuddin bin Abdullah is now the new deputy Minister of Higher Education.

On a recent launch of the Cambridge Advance Diploma in Entrepreneurship. Dato Saifuddin said that his current role in shaping the higher education system in Malaysia is perfect to cultivate an entrepreneurial culture among students in Universities and Colleges. Even with his new portfolio, his aim is still the same.
He also joked he was instrumental for the closing of MeCD as it was the same as the Ministry of IT in India. The Ministry of IT India was established after India is strong in IT as was the same case Malaysian is strong in entrepreneurship.

Joke aside, I do believe that as a whole, Malaysians have the entrepreneurial spirit and regardless what new incarnation of the ministry, we will still be pushing forward. We can only hope, that the new ministers truly believe in the development of entrepreneurs and not just give good lip service.

As of now, the wikipedia page have been updated 5 days ago and the MeCD website is already down.

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Author: Daniel CerVentus (159 Articles)

Daniel is the founder of Entrepreneurs.my and a web producer that is involved in various projects such as ThisWeekInAsia.net and Earth247 He is very passionate about startups and entrepreneurship around the region. You can follow Daniel at www.twitter.com/cerventus

Sloane

Shaping the higher education system in Malaysia to cultivate entrepreneurial culture among students in Universities and Colleges? Good luck with that. The ones that go for tertiary education go because they see paper qualification as a safety net, they are those who did well enough in a schooling system that trained them for Industrial-Discipline i.e. work hard, obey rules, get a cert, get a job. You think kids are stupid enough to stay in college once they realize they're smart enough to start making money a lot more money than their lecturers?

Seriously, what's the point of slaving through 13 years of boring schooling only to have our creativity blunted, courage diminished and being made fearful of mistakes and failure if we're going to have to unlearn everything we've learned to become entrepreneurs? Why doesn't our government just allocate our education budget to individual families to help their kids go to boot camps or use it as investments to grow capital, fund incubator ventures; teach kids to fail small so they grow up to take big risks!

Let's be honest : the total skill and personality set of an entrepreneur goes against everything schooling discipline conditioned us to be. Think about it.