NADMA was allegedly useless during the recent floods… so what is it for, actually?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or in Putrajaya), you’ve probably noticed that Malaysia had been facing a tragedy for the past week: massive floods over several states. This disaster destroyed homes and cars, killed people, and gave politicians a prime opportunity to show off their terpaling prihatin keluarga Malaysia-ness – which many of them shamelessly took.

Anyways, the floods did more than sweep away homes and belongings: they also swept away the government’s credibility in handling disasters. People have been calling out instances that point towards slow response by the authorities, communication problems between the related agencies, and misplaced priorities, despite Malaysia having so much past experience with floods. At the center of it all is a government agency that’s allegedly so useless in this crisis, multiple people have called for the Minister in charge of it to step down.

“We refer to several news reports stating the Armed Forces were deployed late to the flood disaster areas around the Klang Valley due to NADMA’s failure to coordinate. Some even reported that NADMA was somewhat reluctant to involve the Armed Forces for unknown reasons… We urge Abdul Latiff to be responsible for this failure and resign from his post immediately,” – Zaidel Baharuddin, MUDA Information Chief, as quoted by NST.

NADMA there stands for the National Disaster Management Agency, and the Minister in charge is Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department (Special Functions) Datuk Dr Abdul Latiff Ahmad.

If this is your first time hearing of NADMA, you might be surprised to know that perhaps ironically…

NADMA was established after the last big flood disaster

While the agency sounds very 80s, NADMA is actually quite new – it was established in 2015. Back then, the country was reeling from the massive floods that hit the east coast states and Johor the year before. Commonly known as the bah kuning (yellow flood), it was said to be the worst flood incident we’d had in 50 years: 25 people died, 136,447 families were displaced, and losses from the disaster were estimated to be around RM2.9 billion.

Following that catastrophe, among other things the government decided that we should have a specific agency under the Prime Minister’s Department to patch up some issues they had when handling the disaster. It was considered apt at the time, since climate change is causing disasters to be more frequent and complex, and unlike other countries, Malaysia did not have a specific agency to handle disasters yet then.

So the responsibility of handling crises and disasters was taken out of the National Security Council (MKN) and given to a newly formed, separate agency called NADMA. According to the only NADMA annual report we could find, NADMA was established to formulate new strategies to make disaster management ‘more efficient, effective, and accessible to all rungs of society, especially victims of disasters’.

Some of NADMA’s responsibilities include

• spearheading disaster management, from planning, controlling, and coordinating the management of disasters, including trainings
• doing public awareness programs
• leading humanitarian and disaster aids
• carrying out post-disaster actions
• handling a fund to help disaster victims (the Kumpulan Wang Amanah Bantuan Bencana Negara), and
• generally being the ‘focal point of disaster management at the regional and international levels‘

Seems like some pretty lofty aspirations, because based on what we’ve seen in reports following the recent floods…

NADMA essentially went “nadma fault” for the recent bad flood management

As we’ve already mentioned, the government’s handling of this disaster is a disaster in its own right, and NADMA, having literally ‘disaster management’ in its name, quickly became a target for the people’s frustrations. We’d say that most reports we’ve seen regarding NADMA in the past week had been them essentially tai chi-ing the blame to someone else.

One of the more serious issues was a report that went viral following the disaster, which quoted Abdul Latiff (that NADMA minister) as saying that NADMA is not directly involved in natural disasters at the state level, and that it had no plans to place its offices and staff at the district level as it’s ‘involves a huge cost’. Abdul Latiff had since lambasted the report for being irresponsible and untrue…

“This is an irresponsible and untrue report, and it’s also confusing many people. Ensure an accurate report before sharing,” – Abdul Latiff, translated from Utusan Malaysia.

…however a quick check revealed that he did say those things, albeit in Parliament about a month ago (15 November, page 40). Then, he also basically told people to not fully depend on NADMA for disaster management, a sentiment that seems to still hold true even now.

“NADMA is only an agency that takes care of, wanting to give reparations. However, flood business are three things that are shared that is (between) the local government, the state government, and the federal government. Therefore matters that are related to floods or disasters have to be shared. Do not give it fully to the federal government.” – Abdul Latiff, as translated from page 40, DR. 15.11.2021

As for their alleged incompetence in coordinating operations during the recent floods, their response can also be summarized as ‘nad nadma fault‘. NADMA Head Director Datuk Dr Aminuddin Hassim said that they already delegated every responsibility to responder agencies in advance, during a meeting on federal disaster management with Ismail Sabri in September. So NADMA isn’t at fault, but it is implied that the responder agencies and the disaster management at state level were to blame instead.

“Back then we assigned responsibilities to all responder agencies. So they already understand and know the functions they need to perform, should there be a disaster. Disasters have three levels, the first being local in the districts. The second level involves more districts and a state, whereas the third is national or involving two or three states. So everyone already knew… So there’s no need to say (whether it’s coordinated or not).

“Loose coordination did not happen and from time to time we will go down and monitor the preparedness of the states.” – Aminuddin Hassim, as translated from Astro Awani.

There were other responses reported, like towards allegations that they’re the reason why the army had to delay disaster relief efforts, but those are just as disappointing as well, so we won’t be including those. But by now it should be pretty hard to argue that…

NADMA needs to either step up their game, or step down

Thou shalt not roast when writing news articles, but this whole NADMA fiasco is making it hard. Perhaps interestingly, Abdul Latiff had at one point even tried to brush off allegations of his incompetence by suggesting that the floods had been ‘politicized’, and that they were ‘unexpected’.

“To the frontliners and victims who were affected by the disaster, this was something unexpected. Therefore, I feel the disaster shouldn’t be politicised because it (the floods) is more a platform that is color blind,” – Abdul Latiff, as quoted by Malay Mail.

For the record, this incident wasn’t unexpected, and for an agency to blatantly brush off bad disaster management when their name is literally the National Disaster Management Agency is quite unbecoming. Regardless on whether the state level or the federal level is to blame, NADMA’s function as stated in their own annual report is to coordinate all activities and collaborations before, during, and after disasters, and it’s clear that this part was not performed to their best ability recently, when it mattered the most.

So moving forward, perhaps it’s best for NADMA to focus less on preserving their image and more on preserving the rakyat from disasters. Instead of blaming every random technicality, it probably won’t be the worst idea to discuss what really went wrong this time and figure out a way to fix it – we’re sure a lot of experts would be glad to give their thoughts on the matter. If that’s too hard, it’s not shameful to step down and let someone else who actually wants to do the job take over.

Unless some changes are made soon, NADMA will remain in the public’s eyes as yet another unnecessary government agency.