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Fat seminar envelops: Touching a raw nerve
2007-09-18 09:28:10
By Editor
Whoever wants to touch a raw nerve today, he should dwell on the issue of the endless flurry of seminars and workshops, which have engulfed this country for several years now.
This has now become an industry by itself, and there might be a need to assess its impact on the development of this country.
Seminars have become a major pre-occupation of decision makers, civil servants and private sector employees, such that there was a time when the government announced a limit to the number of seminars which a public service employee was supposed to attend per year, short of which the person would be penalized or lose job altogether.
It is clear that the warning fell on deaf ears and was in fact not implementable as there was actually no one to bell the cat.
Apart from the need to brainstorm on and tackle the major problems of the day, the tempo of seminars and workshops is also influenced by incentives that go with attendance, the more the incentives, the more the attendance.
A cleric recently ignited debate on this issue by declaring that sitting allowances (bahasha culture) for workshop participants needs to be re-examined from the ethical point of view.
He said that the system was not transparent, and not subject to public control, not taxable and with no legal basis.
He added that the culture relayed a message to people that it is not work that rewards, but to be clever and learn to network, leading to a major decrease in moral appreciation of human work and joy of work to a person in terms of human dignity.
Many of us have attended these seminars, and the intention here is not to make a blanket judgement on seminar participants but rather to meditate whether our highly rewarding seminars are making a difference in our society or if they have become an end in themselves.
It is quite possible that seminar resolutions on poverty eradication, democracy, disease eradication and the like have formed a rusting, useless mountain heap, with a very little percentage being utilized or bearing fruit.
Worse still, with the mushrooming NGOs and fund-raising activities, we have reached a point whereby some high ranking government officials who accept invitations to grace those occasions demand not only allowances for themselves, but their whole delegation, apart from enjoying free accommodation.
Is this workshop mania, development mania or fat-envelop mania? If the management of say, an NGO, dishes out such a hefty sum in a single occasion, just how much of its donor-driven budget actually goes to the targeted persons?
There is a possibility that this fat-envelop mania is not the preserve of a country like ours.
Just recently, there was a furore in a major European state when the wife of the prime minister demanded hefty sums for agreeing to grace a fundraising event for the needy in Australia.
Her visit was drowned in the sea of public outcry and was eventually cancelled.
To conclude, we need to state that a debate on this issue is quite appropriate at the moment, with the theme being how best the true spirit of meetings and seminars can be preserved.
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