The enormous budget allocated to PEMANDU and the exorbitant fees running into tens of millions of ringgit paid to consultants: RM66 million was spent to set up PEMANDU, the bulk of this going to foreign consultants including RM36 million to McKinsey and Co1; RM16 million was paid to seven consulting firms to run the 12 NKEA labs2; The operating cost of the now 60-strong ETP unit is estimated at RM53 million per year in 2011 and 2012. Its eight directors pocket about RM39,000 a month each, while the associate directors each receive an average RM23,300 per month3.

Let’s move beyond criticism of PEMANDU
A programme as massive and ambitious as the ETP is bound to have detractors. Critics have focused on 4 main issues:

1. The enormous budget allocated to PEMANDU and the exorbitant fees running into tens of millions of ringgit paid to consultants:
   
   • RM66 million was spent to set up PEMANDU, the bulk of this going to foreign consultants including RM36 million to McKinsey and Co¹;
     
   • RM16 million was paid to seven consulting firms to run the 12 NKEA labs²;
     
   • The operating cost of the now 60-strong ETP unit is estimated at RM53 million per year in 2011 and 2012. Its eight directors pocket about RM39,000 a month each, while the associate directors each receive an average RM23,300 per month³.
     
2. Accusations that the ETP lacks substance and is given weight only by the excellent presentation skills of Datuk Seri Idris Jala, the charismatic PEMANDU CEO who has skillfully hyped up the “many EPPs” during each of the eight ETP updates so far⁴;
   
3. Carping that many projects were private sector projects that would have proceeded regardless but were shoehorned into the ETP to boost its scale. Some examples include the St. Regis Hotel at KL Sentral, which was already under construction when the ETP was launched⁵, as well as the Educity initiative in the Iskandar Development Region; and
   
4. Claiming that the ETP has unrealistic assumptions with regard to expected investments, job creation, incremental GNI and real wage and GNI growth rates.
   

For example, if the objective of the ETP is to really double our incomes, it would require a per capita real GNI growth of 6.6% per year from 2009 to 2020. This is two times the 3.2% average real per capita GNI growth rate achieved over the ten years ended 2010 – a tall order indeed. - From Blog Lim Kiat Siang