Friday, February 29, 2008

Malaysia, where to now?

Note: This post was actually written for an assignment. We all had to come up with a bunch of blog posts and this was mine.

“To look backward for a while is to refresh the eye, to restore it, and to render it the more fit for its prime function of looking forward.”

Mark these words. The world is changing. For the first time in living memory, the Pax Americana hangs in the balance. For the first time in post world war history, a nation has emerged with the geographical depth, the social cohesion and the economic strength to challenge the established superpower of our time.* The Chinese dragon has twisted communism beyond recognition and implemented the semblance of a market economy. The Russian bear awakens. Islamic civilization is beginning to stir. At the same time, the world is waking up to a reality that our environment is damaged, that the mother earth can no longer take the damage we throw at her. International standards of conduct are now no longer held as sacrosanct. These are dangerous times.


Amidst all this chaos, a tiny country in South East Asia stands at a fork in the path. Malaysia too is a nation facing a troubled teenage hood. Too small and too few in number to tilt the global power balance, Malaysia is in most things a decision taker and not a decision maker. [ Lets talk geopolitical realities eh, not sentimental word pictures. ]


Where are we heading?


I find that a question hard to answer in concrete terms. I find it hard to answer it in any form, because honestly, I have no idea where this nation is heading too.


A general election looms on the horizon, this should be a time when people are all geared up to choose where the nation is going too in the next five years. Yet, tell me honestly, do you know where the government plans to take the country in five years? Do you know where the opposition plans to take the country in five years?


One thing which is so obviously missing from the campaigning is any sort of gameplan for the country. Campaigning in our country plays along racial lines, on racial issues, on short term effects. They tell us they’re going to make us rich and prosperous. But they never tell us how. I suspect part of the reason is that they’ve no idea how either. It just sounds really good.


A simple answer would be that our political leaders are bankrupt of ideas. Get over it already opposition. The reason why you’re not in power is not just because media coverage is unfair etc etc, but plainly because you don’t have the answers to the questions that face this nation. You can’t answer the simple question of where should Malaysia be heading. How can a thinking rational person support you based on the hope that because you’ve made so much noise about what you think is wrong, that you then deserve to rule the country? We know what’s wrong, what we need is solutions, not an echo in our ears.


As for the government. Yes, the ruling front has a great track record. Malaysia has prospered greatly since independence. There is a difference between then and now though. Our forefathers had vision. They knew what was needed to forge the way forward. There was a spirit burning that we were all brothers, that it didn’t matter so much that we came from different races, that we had different religions. Our forefathers were no idiots. They didn’t try to hide that there were racial differences or to gloss over them. But they knew that no matter whether one was indian or chinese or malay, our sweat and blood are the same colour. And when it got down to putting those drops of sweat and blood into forging a path forward for our country, the strength of that torrent was what mattered. The strength of that river of blood and sweat laid the foundation for the progress we have seen. Answer me honestly, does our current government dare admit that all sections of the population are equally deserving, and play important roles in the development of this country? Because as long as they fail to recognize this, there can be no step forward as a unified nation.


To demonstrate. Let’s take a basic question, where is our economy heading? In the brief years that I’ve been around, I’ve variously seen the government try to turn Malaysia into a


  1. Knowledge Economy
  2. Biotechnology Hub
  3. Hub of Higher Learning
  4. South-east Asian Financial Center


Last I heard, the bio technology city in Putrajaya is still a bunch of uninhabited buildings. As for our National Universities, they’ve almost fallen out of the Times Higher Education ratings. Our South-east Asian Financial Center plan doesn’t seem to have brought in large numbers of traders and our knowledge economy is still stuck in a rut because the kids who should be getting this knowledge can’t use the computer labs for fear it might collapse their heads.


You see, we need to stop talking about unity and racial harmony. Start walking it. Stop believing that you’ve a God given right to the land. No one does. A steward of the house has to take care of the house well or else the master of the house comes in and throws him to the darkness outside. Get that out of the way and perhaps we can then start pointing our country in the right direction. But that’s your choice.


There is no vision, there is no passion. We’re a nation without a soul. We choose to spend our time bickering amongst ourselves, we want to split ourselves by race and we all want to claim our own race as superior to all others. And we do all these, in that little country called Malaysia. We all want to be “jaguh” tapi, jaguh kampung lah tu. Kampung to keci lagi. And while we’re so preoccupied being first in our own kampung, we don’t realise that our kampung has been left years behind by the world.


A pity isn’t it?


Can you love a country, but hate the nation? I can.