Let’s see some nation-first leadership
Ooi Kee Beng
ONE thing you learn from driving school is to plan your journey before you set off.
This good advice holds for any journey really, including Malaysia’s route to 2020 – the year it aims to be a developed and high-income nation. Not only is proper, comprehensive and goal-oriented planning needed, but some precise navigation is required as well. And bipartisan consensus, which is what Parliament – if it works properly – is meant to secure for the country.
What is the best route to take to get there from here? What are the hindrances?
The fact is that Malaysians are still fighting over where it is they are actually going. Is the country working towards the creation of a “Bangsa Malaysia” or an Islamic state? Towards a Malay-first polity that must lean towards religion in global orientation or a pluralistic society easily adaptive of the region’s ethnic diversity? Towards becoming a bright example of multicultural vigour or being held hostage by racial populism?
Nation building, I am sure most people would agree, is about developing a rational and practical discourse alongside economic policies that deliver common goods to citizens. It is also about creating a strong sense of national togetherness and common purpose as well as inculcating an understanding of the country’s effective place in the world at large.
Malaysia’s economy is, and has always been, global in orientation, yet its domestic politics has not only been introverted but also advertently divisive. This irony may have had limited consequence in the days of the Cold War when the whole world was also aggressively divided into two. Malaysia benefited politically from this much larger global split, and economically from the fact that communist countries in the region were in no position to compete with it.
Those days are gone and the game has changed. Malaysia must now deal with numerous countries for foreign direct investments now, and the dissonance between internal politics and external economics now reverberates very loudly. The country had been developing, no doubt, but it now finds itself caught in the middle-income trap. But one cannot remain there indefinitely – the mobility of capital and human resources is simply too easy now.
What Malaysia needs on the last stretch towards 2020 is a strong consensus on what the goals for the country are, and how to get there. It boils down to the government taking serious steps to minimise social tensions, closing the income gap, improving governance, and enhancing economic growth – and doing these all at once.
Fifty years after Malaysia was founded, it is a time for nation builders to take the lead again. The demagogues need to be relegated into a corner.
Since the Cold War ended, Malaysia has been caught in a pendulum swing between broad developmental goals and partisan politics, and with every swing, some momentum is lost. A day of reckoning draws near.
In 1991, then premier Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad came up with a commendable and elaborate list of goals towards which the country was to work over the coming three decades. These were, however, forgotten after the 1997/98 financial crisis hit the region and the country.
Five years after that, Tun Abdullah Badawi, who took over as premier, profiled himself as a reformer and even propounded an approach to Islamic thinking that would minimise tensions between religious dogmatism and democratic governance.
This proved a big hit and he won a landslide victory in the 2004 general election. Soon after that, however, the pendulum started swinging back, and already in 2005, both his ambitious reforms and his advocacy of Islam Hadhari were being silenced by a sharp rise in Malay ethnocentrism within his own party.
Voters reacted strongly to this change and Barisan Nasional suffered bad results in the election in March 2008, and Abdullah forfeited the leadership of his party the following year.
Reading the ground correctly, his successor Datuk Seri Najib Razak took on Abdullah’s original mantel and also styled himself a reformist prime minister. “1 Malaysia” was his all-encompassing slogan.
