I BEGIN with a confession. I may be fairly described as a dyed in the wool admirer of Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s Minister Mentor. I am pleased that his recent visit to our country went well. He was received and treated as an honoured visitor, in the grand palaces and everywhere else he went, as well he should, because Lee undoubtedly played an important and historic role in the creation of Malaysia as a political entity. That is a historical fact.
I am glad that Lee gave Mahathir a wide berth. It would have left a bad taste in the mouth if he had asked to meet the bitter old man of Malaysian politics. Mahathir could have been relied upon to be obnoxious and boorish as only Mahathir knows how. His reference to Lee as the little emperor from a small Middle Kingdom is vintage Mahathir, dripping with venom and uncharitable innuendoes. The man, Mahathir I mean, is a total disgrace to the Malay sense of gracious hospitality and traditional decorum. I suppose the kindest thing to do is to ignore Mahathir and let him continue to entertain the sad fantasy that he is an indispensable part of our country’s process of governance.
Lee Kuan Yew is far from perfect. His record on human rights and media freedom is well documented, and there is not a great deal to choose between his and ours. We should wipe off that feeling of smugness. On balance, though, Lee runs a tight ship and Singapore’s pre-eminent position as a modern, affluent and corruption free society owes entirely to his vision and his determination. What he has achieved for his country in the face of the hopelessly impossible challenges says a great deal about his single minded devotion to public duty in the public interest. Enriching himself or his family has never been part of his game plan.
He has never wavered in his belief right at the outset that corruption, humanity’s greatest curse, was not going to be a feature of Singapore’s governance model. His administration is both clean and efficient, and Singapore’s economy is among the most competitive in the world. Judged against most indicators, Singapore is among the top global performers. While we wallow in corruption and are daily buffeted by one financial scam after another, the ‘Little Red Dot’ – the highly offensive name former President Habibi of Indonesia gave Singapore – continues to notch one accolade after another. Singapore has shown that size does not matter.
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It must have to do with the unusually hot weather we are experiencing that has brought about a touch of mid-summer madness among one or two senior members of PAS who have decided against their better judgment to break ranks to engage Umno in talks about the prospects of forming a national unity government. Otherwise why would reasonably sane people want to risk peer condemnation and denunciation by doing the unthinkable? This is the most charitable explanation I can offer.
We need a national unity government like we need a hole in the head. The thought of sleeping with the ethically debased and morally detestable Barisan Nasional government is simply too abhorrent to contemplate. Are we such reckless and irresponsible gluttons for punishment that in spite of having endured the Umno excesses in social, economic and political terms these last three decades, we are now asking for more of the same? That, believe it or not, is what we will get for our trouble. Umno will be more than happy to oblige.
They have nothing to lose and everything to benefit from our mindless gamble with our future. Why are some of us so eager to go to bed with a political party that has not one redeeming feature left to justify our risking our hard-earned reputation? Where are our much trumpeted principles of honesty and integrity? Are we no different, after all, from the Umno that we despise? Don’t we care two hoots about the people up and down the country who campaigned and voted for us and gave us five states to govern because they were disgusted and fed up with the Umno majority government and its antics?
That some members of the top PAS leadership could even think of getting under the blanket with BN, and Umno in particular, is extremely worrying. We must never lose sight of the fact that when voters across the nation threw their very considerable support behind the DAP, PAS, and PKR on that fateful day of March 8, 2008, they wanted change, not just any change, but the sort of transformation that would put paid to the unbridled, wonton political corruption that has left this country in total disarray on every conceivable front.
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PRIME MINISTER Najib Abdul Razak has done it again. His high income vision for Malaysia, following so closely on the heels of his yet to be fully charted 1Malaysia has caught the nation off guard.
Najib, while remaining largely uninspiring as a leader, is at least aspirational. Nothing wrong with indulging in a little fantasy from time to time, but Najib has to learn to control his propensity for grandstanding. I don’t suppose it is too rude to ask Najib to spell out in the clearest possible terms what precisely he has in mind when he talks about 1Malaysia. Is it fair to ask us to support a concept that he has difficulty in articulating to our satisfaction?
Najib cannot be so naïve that he cannot see what the inherent problems are in the way of turning Malaysia into a high income nation. For starters, a country such as ours which has been so mismanaged these last thirty years in all the important areas of governance is a most unlikely candidate for the High Income Country Stake.
That does not mean that we have not the potential; indeed we have but, I am afraid we have squandered it beyond belief by putting in place investment, trade and industrialisation policies that have tended towards excessive, crippling control rather than encouragement to compete globally.
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