Read guide steering the way towards Penang2030

Ahmad Fuzi (left) receiving a memento from Yeow during The Star’s courtesy call on the Governor.

SOMETHING that the Yang di-Pertua Negri of Penang said has been repeating in my head for days.

“Do you know the Penang2030 strategies? Most Penangites might not know what they are about.”

Tun Ahmad Fuzi Abdul Razak was concerned that Penang folk handling their little day-to-day worries might neither understand nor even care what Penang was collectively trying to achieve.

Star Media Group Berhad paid a courtesy call on the Governor of Penang recently and Ahmad Fuzi gave us a full hour plus an extra 15 minutes to wrap things up.

In attendance were Star Media Group chief executive officer Alex Yeow, client brand marketing general manager Simone Liong, administration manager Michelle Tang and this writer.

Ahmad Fuzi has a firm grasp on many socio-economic issues of the state.

He laid it all out for us and called on The Star to play a role in helping the man-on-the-street become more aware of these issues and be guided by long-term plans such as Penang2030.

After all, an individual cannot just live day by day and hope to achieve sustainability by reacting to whatever is in front of their noses.

As people in a shared space, we must move as one towards shared objectives if we are to have any sort of a bright future.

Penang2030 was launched in August 2018 and when Penang2030 Guide was published in 2019, I strove to get both the hard and soft copies.

I read the guide twice. It has 59 pages, not counting pages without text. Maybe people these days, enamoured with memes and TikTok, don’t have the patience to read 59 pages; so yes, Tun probably has a valid worry.

I loved the guide after just the first reading. Lucid. Concise. Simple English. No wasting of words.

The first section is called “The Chief Minister’s Invitation”.

Chow Kon Yeow’s first sentence is: “My fervent hope with Penang2030, a vision and an approach that has been worked out after consultation with stakeholders at all levels, is that it will encourage all citizens to participate in policy-making and to take responsibility for their own future.”

Oh ya, can I please ask the people running www.penang2030.com to enable the copy-and-paste feature in the downloadable PDF soft copy of Penang2030 Guide?

There are people studying and dissecting the guide. It is a public document. Don’t make them type out sentences from the guide to quote it. Just let us copy and paste.

The guide rests on four themes, which seem more like tenets.

The first three are straightforward and can be condensed into: increasing liveability, upgrading the economy and strengthening civic participation.

The fourth theme titled “Invest in the built environment to build resilience” is a bit more complex

Each theme has four initiatives, which in turn has three targets each. The rhymes and reasons for all the initiatives and targets are succinctly explained.

It is a time-honoured management system. Every vision has missions. Each mission has objectives. Each objective has to-do lists. The vision helps keep the millions of items in the to-do list on the same track.

Without that vision, people will be so buried in the millions of items in their to-do lists that they may forget their fathers’ surnames, so to speak, much less Penang2030.

I am running out of print space so I will not type out Penang2030’s strategic initiatives and targets.

Just go to www.penang2030.com, run the scroll wheel on your mouse a couple of times and there it will be, the downloadable guide.

Read it.