Good Governance
By batsman
Often when I read about good governance, it is usually about having a good set of laws and leaders who rule fairly and progressively. The important words here are “fair and progress”, not leaders, rules, laws and institutions. Unfortunately there is altogether too much obsession over leaders, rules, laws and institutions, although I must admit these, if they are “good”, are supposed to give rise to fairness and progress.
There ARE other things that can give rise to fairness and progress. I think one of the most important is checks and balances.
A good government is one that is able to take ALL the forces within society into account and give them due expression such that there is progress of a reasonable rate of society as a whole. It is like a good manager making use of all the available resources at his disposal in the best possible way to ensure the company moves forward at a reasonable rate without hiccups and delays caused by inadequate attention paid to possible obstructive forces such as unhappy employees.
A lot of managers make use of only one or two resources at his command to push the company forward at the fastest rate. Often such resources are a creative accountant making use of business and tax laws that make a company grow by several fold with the help of gullible or co-conspiratorial bankers and investors.
Such a business model works very well for mega-sized companies especially in the US. Unfortunately such a business model also creates lots of victims and is often only short term in nature.
In terms of government, a good one seeks to reduce the number of victims and marginalized persons without too much sacrifice on progress since it is also possible that creative and productive persons become themselves marginalized if too much attention is given to unproductive people. So it is a difficult balancing act. That is where checks and balances become important.
I shall refrain discussing racial and religious complexities to allow this write up to be contained within a few thousand words and also not to make the issue too complicated. Often racial and religious complexities mean that the people themselves become overly self centered, demand too much for themselves, ask too much of others and make the cake impossible to divide fairly without serious quarrels breaking out. This can only mean that the people themselves become ungovernable. In such a situation, the only good government is a dictatorial one.
In most cases, most governments have to balance dictatorial tendencies with democratic tendencies to rule effectively, so this is not a debate about dictatorship versus democracy in case some dumb pseudo-liberal asses want to make it so.
It is about checks and balances. In a society there are many different types of people with different qualities and interests. When those of a similar character group together, they become a vocal force compared to being a non-vocal force if they are disorganized. The most basic groupings in my view are between ordinary people and above average creative people, not about race or religion, although race and religion does complicate things immensely often to the detriment of society as a whole.
Most governments are a balancing act between these 2 forces. In the west, they are characterized somewhat by Labour and Tory, Democrats and Republicans, although things have been complicated somewhat in the last few decades with many creative people siding with Labour and many dumb asses siding with Tories.
Suffice to say that if ordinary people hold the balance of power, governments tend to spend more on social welfare and charity projects which tend to draw down on capital while if creative people hold the balance of power, governments tend to spend more on research, science, investment, weapons of war – projects that tend to make capital (which is usually controlled by productive people) grow even bigger.
In former communist countries, the government was supposed to represent ordinary people, but they came to rely more and more on creative and productive people to the extent that most of the spending was on research and building of weapons of war. The clever people in communist countries became jealous of the power and wealth of the west and guarded their interests closely and small-mindedly and became elites in closed and secretive countries.
But there are no pure things left in these world especially things that involve society and governments these days flow with the most influential lobbies on each specific project or policy. This is where a Democrat as President of the US finds it difficult to implement public health care while a Republican President finds it difficult to spend too much on weapons and warfare. These are the types of checks and balances that make a country healthy.
I am not saying ALL checks and balances are good. In the US, the checks and balances tend to favour the war-mongers and bullies in their foreign affairs, but at least these checks and balances work fairly well for the US internally, apart from the tendency to favour big banks and even bigger crooks.
In spite of the biased checks and balances in the US, Malaysia does not even approach a tiny fraction of the fairness of the US system (note that the US is not considered a fair country by any standards – one has to look to Scandinavian countries or even Venezuela for greater fairness). This is shown by 52 years of uninterrupted UMNO rule which indicates even to the most stupid that checks and balances do not exist. Further, lawyers have the ability to appoint judges in a transparent and widely publicized way if they have good political contacts and hoodlums in a government agency are suspected of murder while the authorities seem to be covering up for them. The list of consequences of lack of checks and balances are many and well-known.
We do not have any semblance of checks and balances because not only is the political forces extremely skewed in favour of UMNO, the economic wealth of the country is also skewed in favour of a controlling influence by UMNO. UMNO controls the purse strings of the ALL richest entrepreneurs and industrialists in the country – whether through approvals and permits or through awards of contracts and even through grey semi-legal use of authority and other dirty tricks. Those that are relatively free of UMNO control have most of their businesses already transferred to other countries and in general do not feel any loyalty or major interest in Malaysia at all. So they don’t bother to organize as a counter-force. This means there is no effective checks and balances.
Frankly, it is a dream if we think that we could have effective checks and balances as long as UMNO controls political and economic power. Whatever institutional re-engineering we undertake can only be distorted and perverted as long as UMNO holds both political and economic power.
Sadly this fact is slowly dawning on the creative people of Malaysia, so they are turning back towards kow-towing to UMNO. The gains of the 12th GE are being diluted by a swinging of support of the most creative and productive people back towards UMNO. Thus UMNO now controls not only the support of ordinary people, but has increasingly greater support from creative and productive people. This situation is akin to the situation in former communist countries where the government claims to represent the ordinary people but is reliant on a small group of small-minded and corrupt elitists.
We may claim that our political system is similar to the British system, but for all practical purposes, it is actually similar to the political system of a communist country.
It will take more than 2 GEs to build up a proper check and balance system. We have to pay this price. There is no getting away from it. This is because in the west the rich industrialists and businessmen built their country and created their government while in Malaysia, it is the political party in power that created most of the richest people in our country. In Malaysia, the government (including the colonial government before independence) created the millionaires. This can only mean that our wealthy people are only capable of coming up with a weak, asinine, small minded, kiasu pseudo-liberalism as opposed to the original liberalism of the west.
But this does not mean that there is no hope. As more and more new generations come into being, they become better and better trained as well as more and more productive and creative in comparison to those of the older generations. In the west, such a process can take several generations because it is they who created the technologies and the business models while we only need to copy from them.
The new generations will realize how corrupt, obsolete, dumb and incompetent the cronies and appointees of political parties are. Even the millionaires created by political parties will pale in comparison to self-made millionaires of the new generations and will need to rely on political contacts to maintain their positions. The old will act as obstacles to the dreams and ambitions of the new. They may even become forces of suppression and oppression on their own children and grandchildren.
This development can only mean that new independent political and economic forces will start to assert themselves and there will be some semblance of checks and balances coming into being which will make our country a healthier democracy.
I am sorry if this analysis sounds vaguely familiar. Perhaps it is, but I hope it is the familiar analysis of millionaires taken into new territory and hopefully realized by a new generation. Heeheehee.
