Arresting the Slide in Our Public Institutions – Part II
By Farish A. Noor
The scholar of comparative politics is often struck by how so many postcolonial nation-states have managed to degenerate into neo-feudal societies where power and politics have become so personalised that state power and the use of force/violence is monopolised in the hands of a few, who nonetheless claim mandate to govern over their respective populations.
This was certainly the case in many of the Communist postcolonial states (such as Vietnam) where the one-party system effectively put an end to any semblance of representative democracy and negated the presence of an active public domain where alternative political opinions or voices could be heard.
But more worrying is the fact that the same has come to pass in so many former colonial states that at the outset inherited the tools and instruments for representative democracy under the rule of law as well. One simply has to look at countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines (under the rule of Marcos) and Indonesia (during the leadership of Suharto) for examples of how even the most vibrant democracies with in-built constitutional guarantees managed to devolve to become oligarchal assemblies of entrenched elites who no longer felt accountable to the citizenry.
The reasons for this slide in our public institutions lies in part in the culture of politics and power in so many countries, including countries like Malaysia that claim to be developed nations. Yet despite the rhetoric of development Malaysia is a country that has more than 1,500 deaths in custody as part of its developmental record: Proof, if any was needed, that building gigantic shopping malls and skyscrapers does not guarantee that one will live in a developed country where public institutions and officials respect the value of human life.
Yet it is our political culture that valorises ’strong leadership’ and ‘powerful leaders’ that has to be held into account here, and the tendency to think of power in terms of state violence (both legitimate and illegitimate) that has to be expressed in the public domain. We still live in societies where people believe that being a powerful leader equals being a good leader; and underlying this assumption is the related assumption that the acquisition of power is an end in itself, by whatever means.
