Leadership and the Cost of Reform
By Farish A. Noor
It seems that ‘reform season’ has arrived in Malaysia, and Malaysians are now being treated to the spectacle of both the ruling party UMNO and the opposition parties of the Pakatan Rakyat racing in the rush to reform themselves.
Perhaps the only good thing to come out of this is the awareness and recognition of the fact that both the ruling parties of the Federal government and the opposition parties that control the state governments of four states have to reform themselves to meet the demands of the Malaysian public. For the first time in decades, the political parties seem to have finally realised that power ultimately rests with the people, and not politicians.
However one also needs to look at the reforms that are being attempted, and ask the question of how far they can go and what they are intended to achieve. Malaysians have become somewhat jaded by the spectacle of cosmetic reforms by now, and able to tell the difference between sweet rhetoric of no substance and the real thing.
For this the Malaysian public has to be thankful to the former leader of the country, former Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi: Badawi’s election in 2004 rode on the crest of a host of reform proposals that sounded almost too good to be true. (And indeed, they were too good to be true.)
Badawi promised to serve as the ‘Prime Minister of all Malaysians’, and claimed that ‘no Malaysian was more Malaysian than another’. He preached the values of transparency, moderation, progressive Islam, moderate politics, multiculturalism and pluralism like there was no tomorrow; and indeed most of these promises never came true in the end. Instead what the Malaysian public saw during his tenureship was the rise of even more race and religion-based communitarian politics, more inter-communal distrust, more instances of religious intolerance, and the sordid spectacle of members of his own parties waving daggers in public while preaching the cause of an exclusive ethno-nationalism that rendered his own promises of a multicultural plural Malaysia hollow.
