DEC 17 — A voter in one of the defunct Soviet republics in the early 1990s going to a voting booth for the first time in her life — in a nation reshaping itself as she made her way through the dirty potholed city street paying the price of adjusting to market economy — recounted how she decided who to vote for. She picked the party with the better ideas.
In Malaysia — in equally turbulent times though not as tragic — we tend to forget that government is about ideas, and the leadership of those ideas.
Parties with better ones thrive and those who don’t struggle. In many cases their ideology generates those ideas and at times it renders many endearing ideas impossible. But it is for the people seeking power to show their way works better for the most number of people with greater likelihood of success.
Without this constancy of pitting ideas against ideas, parties against parties, nations become unimaginative and, in an increasingly globalised planet, incapacitated.
The PKFZ arrests have just begun, and more arrests will follow, and more 1 Malaysia events will follow. Fighting corruption and promoting harmony in society are necessary and important, but the growth engine for a nation will always be ideas.
That is why I worry for Malaysia.
Let’s keep it to the nuts and bolts.
If you are in an office right now, wonder what your company does in order to pay you? Then consider how reliable utilities, transport infrastructure, an efficient civil service, local government, business/tax incentives, human resource base, etc keep your business competitive.
Or if you are at home and it is evening, consider the house mortgage and the instalments for the car, and the grocery bill. Then consider how real inflation is versus the present purchasing power of the ringgit, toll costs despite poor traffic management, tuition/music-swimming-drawing class costs (thanks to failing national schools), the cost of private health insurance, etc.
Now, ask yourself, does this government, this BN government, have ideas to make your life better in a world increasingly unforgiving? Have they made it easy so far?
If you ask me, I’ll tell you this.
The people who run this country have not expressed a proclivity for ideas or its leadership — irrespective of its willingness to do some house-cleaning as window-dressing.
No BN party has a clear distilled ideology, they are populists. So it comes down to the leaders. So who do you have?
A prime minister who creates a KPI minister to tell people how to weigh work and plan their time? If the PM can’t get his Cabinet members to adhere to quality, how can a political exigent from the private sector like Datuk Idris Jala get any traction with them? A principal asking his guidance counsellor to sort out his errant teachers?
Or his cousin who built a political career on being not disagreeable. The Education Ministry is a madhouse churning out As on all the papers they can find so that we all have the placebo feeling we are doing OK, while no one outside this country thinks we are actually producing better students. Now we need to collectively pray for the Home Ministry.
I’ll yield to temptation and have a go at our fixation with consultants. Every ministry is outcompeting the other to get consultants to write them reports.
Why is a country with one of the highest ratio of civil servants in the world, after hiring all these people, ending up asking “hired guns” to sort its policies, directions and values? And if the big ideas are always going to come from outside the civil service, how will a bloated, multilayered and overlapping civil service execute these “advisories”?
Let’s clear a few things. All countries are blessed with enough intelligent people, and by extension clever ideas. The issue is whether there is enough institutional support and political will to get those people to the right places where they can do good.
Our best in the most are uninvolved, and their apathy and distance grows by the day.
The most damning element in the last two decades is the willingness to reduce ideas into sound-bites expressed at launches only.
The Eastern Corridor launch (actually a launch in any direction works in Malaysia), the biodiesel fuel initiative launch, various concerted tourism initiatives, the E-Village which by now is encircled by E-jungle and two days ago RM50 million for football development following Malaysia’s success to the SEA Games final. The list is almost inexhaustible.
The thing is, almost all the initiatives on the face of it have merit. But the willingness by the ministers abetted by civil servants and “corporate friends” to jump headlong into these enterprises without considering the full implication baffles the mind. They just can’t wait to use up the “peruntukkan” (budget).
To all of them, the most important thing is to the play the event/programme/project up enough until everyone is convinced of its existence. Yes, launches, and re-launches, why not?
Can our future be determined by the fact we have declared over and over there is a future?
And second, the complete unwillingness to accept the failures of anything until the blame can be apportioned to an appropriate person or the past.
Until today no person in the Mahathir administration has owned up to colossal failures like Dayabumi. Like a weird construct it remains in the heart of old KL. A glut of space and lacking purpose as a commercial entity. It is not the biggest letdown, but it stares at all city dwellers daily.
All governments fail in some respect. But this government has never put a foot wrong, if you read its press. When you keep printing your own infallibility you find no incentive to improve.
So then what?
You have to decide whether you are always going to stand by the devil you know.
The people waiting to replace have shown moments of gross inexperience, and their learning curve would be of an epic proportion. But anyone ever to replace the current “management” will be wet behind the ears, can that be just reason to stay on this course?
But it is not their success which is going to make us sleep better tonight.
It is our decision not to let just one group of people practise their ideas on our lives that lies the genius of our choice.
Bad ideas have had too long a run here in Malaysia.
I understand that despite all that, like plants fighting through concrete for sunshine, we have had successes. Our people are resilient there is no doubting that. But surely, for the sake of sanity surely, we can’t let our leaders ride on the backs of our resilience in perpetuity.
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