Published: Friday December 12, 2008 MYT 2:49:00 PM
Updated: Friday December 12, 2008 MYT 3:45:10 PM
Scrutinise universities’ expenditure, says Liew
By PRISCILLA DIELENBERG
GEORGE TOWN: There should be more scrutiny over the expenditure of public universities to ensure that the funds are not misused, said Bukit Bendera MP Liew Chin Tong.
“A lot of resources are allocated to the education sector and rightly so, but there should be more scrutiny over how the money is spent to ensure that it is put to good use,” he said on Friday.
Liew, who is policy adviser to Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng, said for example that Universiti Sains Malaysia’s (USM) expenditure was almost double that of the Penang state government’s budget.
“USM’s expenditure for 2007 was RM842mil but the state assembly recently only tabled a RM477mil Budget for 2009,” he added.
Liew, who had brought the matter up at Parliament on Thursday, said the public universities’ Students Affairs Unit was an unnecessary bureaucracy costing millions of ringgit without any returns.
“In the 1960s and early 1970s, the matters now handled by the unit such as the canteen, bus services and clinics, were handled by the students themselves or unions consisting of students and academics,” he said.
He said the unit used up a lot of funds that could be channelled to more important matters, such as the university’s core business of education.
Liew was speaking to reporters after presenting a mock cheque of RM62,450 from KDU College Penang to a representative of its former staff Leng Kavern, who is suffering from mesenchymal chondrosarcoma (a rare skull-based cancer), to help foot his medical bills.
Leng, who has lost one eye to the disease, is in urgent need of RM120,000 for post-surgery proton therapy in China.
College principal Dr Chong Beng Keok said the funds were raised through various activities on Dec 6 and 7, including an art and craft charity auction, a charity food fair and a jumble sale.
She said Leng, who was a Student Service Department executive at the college for two years, was now undergoing treatment in India and would be back in Penang by the end of the month for further treatment.
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