We are in this together

Y. Khairil
The Malaysian Insider
May 31, 2011

MAY 31 — I am a not-so-young Malaysian male of the majority type. You know, the type who people always accuse of being pampered by the government, being coaxed with many affirmative-action niceties and other stuff.

I have lived here all my life and, contrary to the standard image of the constitutionally-protected people, do not have the opportunity nor the money to even step out of my state border, let alone the national border.

I went from primary to tertiary education in government institutions, since it was the only viable choice for my poor family. Until a few years ago, I worked as a lowly factory operator earning just slightly above the officially recognised poverty-level income, although you and I know that “official” things are rarely dependable and practical.

No other employers would take me for some unknown reason, despite my degrees and several language proficiencies. I think I might have been deemed too rebellious for Malay firms or the civil service, and I’m definitely not “leng zai” enough to be courted by Chinese firms. I spent four to five hours of my life daily wasting away in morning and evening rush traffic. What a great life.

However, my time for ranting is over. Here, I will only specify the reason I like it here in the briefest way possible, despite the crappy situation I’m in. Secondary reason; it’s my home and I love it. Furthermore, it’s my ancestral land as well, and it’s not like I have any other ancestral lands out there (unless I extrapolate it anthropologically, in which case Africa and South China are also my ancestral lands).

Apart from the racism and corruption, Malaysia is like a heaven on earth. Where else can you find a place where there’s no brutal natural disaster (almost), where there’s variety in food and in people, and where there is no terrorism (as yet)? Despite the grave situation now, Malaysia is still relatively peaceful.

It’s small enough not to exhaust you during journeys, but big enough for you to go around. Malaysian life is anything but monotonous, definitely. For example, can you imagine a teenage boy’s life where you can only hit on girls who look blandly similar to you? Or a life where you know only curse words of your own language? Or a life of facing the same type of food day after day? Nightmarish, that’s for sure.

Even the media is wonderfully mixed up. Just look at the recent explosive mix of racist expletives and religious zealotry in the mainstream papers. It’s wonderful, really.

I think other people can explain better what makes Malaysia their home forever. I’m not going to dwell on it further. Instead of ranting on the shortcomings of Malaysia, I’m going to offer my view on how to drag Malaysia out of its quagmire:

1) Make government leaders accountable for their work and make transparency a standard operating procedure

The problem with our leaders is not how much public fund they have in their hands, but rather how they use it. Currently, transparency is very far from our leaders’ minds. Just look at the Lynas issue, where deals are done clandestinely without public purview even when it concerns the health of the citizens.

They are not required to tell everyone what they do with the public funds. Hence, they are free to spend it on anything, including things like entertainment trips to Europe, London mansions, luxury parties and by-elections, all without the knowledge of the public.

Then comes the time for things considered citizens’ welfare such as subsidies and utility costs, and they say that public funds is decreasing, justifying the need for less subsidy and increased tariffs. Just like that, no details or proof whatsoever.

Just make them work under a performance-based payslip and make their daily work so visible and transparent it would make the human rights zealots cry. After all, everyone else worked under performance supervision, so there’s no reason why government leaders shouldn’t.

This will require a total neutrality of the civil service though, to ensure that there will be no bias. Probably private sector leaders’ help will be needed, to provide a check and balance as well as a good trump card; after all, they pay the largest percentage of taxes.

2) Restructure our urbanisation process and decentralise all urban activities

Jobs propel urbanisation, but it is clear from the agony of everyone stuck in KL traffic jams that our main cities have long exceeded their capacity. Given that the nature of employment is fluid and ever changing, more buildings are built to anticipate the fluidity, but usually only a few are fully utilised.

Most of the time, they are built without even considering the access to transportation pathways, causing the buildings to be built far from public transport hubs and making the traffic in the area worse.

But whether used or not, they still need to be maintained, applying considerable market force brought on by maintenance cost upon property sales and rental prices. Combine that with the detrimental effects of property speculation games played by the wealthy, and you’ve got yourself a city full of buildings that only the filthy rich can buy. This makes city workers choose either to risk paying high rentals to live in the city, or to use less expenses by staying far away at the expense of time and tolls.

The buildings leave little space for city improvements, causing bottlenecks in transport pathways into the cities during rush hours. This causes our already pathetic road-based public transport to be even less effective, and forces everyone to take out loans to buy vehicles, even for those who can’t afford it, like me.

The combined effect of high personal transportation costs and household debts drains the life out of everyone, and results in the curses and rants and migration whims you’ve been hearing about.

The simplest thing to do is to encourage business activities to relocate to towns or small cities further away from the main cities. This will gentrify the sleepy towns and rejuvenate them, making them the satellite cities of the main cities. People can afford the cheaper properties closer to their workplace and be happier.

Heck, even the companies can be happy if they chose well, for there could be less competition and more market coverage in the gentrified towns. There would be no more impediments to company growth; reduced traffic will ensure less interruptible supply chain, and greater morale among workers coming in to work in the morning.

GDP will be increased, and our PM will be happy and boast about it to his peers.

At the same time, this will clear out the traffic in the main cities, improving our public transport flow and reduce the need for expensive vehicles. People will have more money to spend, increasing their purchasing power. City planners can then bulldoze unused infrastructure to make way for city improvements, like bigger roads, revamped public transport routes or green recreational parks. This creates a healthier, greener city, and a happier you and me.

3) Get rid of the deals, agreements and whatnots that are draining public funds

Everyone in the car industry knows how much profit the AP hoarders can generate from air with little effort, and every ex-TNB CEO knows how much profit IPPs are leeching out of TNB, and subsequently public funds.

These lopsided agreements benefit the few at the expense of the many, and create a large economic gap in society. Look, with our “tak apa” attitude, we even agreed to take in Australia’s radioactive crap and refugees that the Aussies don’t want, no questions asked. These shady deals are also one of the reasons why there is so much money outflow in the country.

However, breaking an agreement could lead to internal and regional conflict. The dominant IPPs and their multitude of subsidiaries in various fields could stage a corporate boycott if their agreements are breached. Singapore may threaten us with war if we breach their severely lopsided water agreement.

But if Malaysia can’t show its stern stance with regards to its sovereignty and integrity, it would forever be played for a fool by bad people and exploited by regional peers. Sometimes, we do need to wave the big stick. There is no point in honouring an agreement that leaves us on the losing end. It’s funny to see how some leaders vehemently protect these lopsided agreements, while at the same time “forgetting” their own promise to do some beneficial work for the people.

4) Revise and restructure our education system

To be frank, I find our education system to be a puzzling maze of bureaucracy and vested interests. We have separate management policies and cultures for national, vernacular national and private institutions. To top it all, the education policy changes with every passing education minister. Despite all its glory, our current system succeeded in making a student score the most As, but it failed in creating a good individual and citizen.

From a nationalistic point of view, I consider the vernacular education a good potential for our citizens, since it can enrich their skills and broaden their views. Sadly, it has now become a thorn in our national integrity.

Instead of vernacular education being an option to our students, it has become a sort of racially-exclusive rights. I don’t recall anything in the constitution stating that vernacular education is restricted to a relevant race, but sadly it is so. I know that vernacular education is constitutionally guaranteed, but right now the race attribute and the culture attribute of vernacular education is not yet separate.

Who would think that, for example, Chinese schools are for all Malaysians, rather than all Chinese Malaysians? None, sadly. This has made our education system racially polarised, endangering the social integrity of our young citizens.

Thus, it is time to discard all the old framework and reintegrate everything into a single national stream. National and vernacular stream’s curriculum should be integrated, reducing bureaucratic overheads and allowing smoother resource management, as well as opening up the curriculum to broader access.

It should be compulsory for everyone to learn core national values in the national courses, but a merit for students to pursue additional vernacular courses. The system should reward the effort of those pursuing both national and vernacular education as an incentive for their attempt in understanding the culture of their fellow citizens and enriching their soft skills.

Integration would also mean merging of the infrastructure, enabling better utilisation of resources and forcing the students to mingle in an ethnically-mixed community early in their childhood, as opposed to the single-ethnic crowds often found in national and vernacular schools now. This will aid their integration, since it is relatively easier to discard racial barriers and stereotypical assumptions among young children.

The children would have an easier time absorbing a vernacular curriculum, since they would have fellow peers with native proficiency in the relevant subject just a stone’s throw away. In time, this will create a generation who identify themselves on a national level, instead of ethnic level, a generation who would readily work together to develop Malaysia regardless of each individual’s differences.

5) Uphold meritocracy and recalibrate affirmative action

Have you ever experienced the feeling that you could do better than your boss? I think this is probably what everyone here feels about the current leadership. I don’t think it’s because the leaders are not trying, but it is because there are incompetent people dragging the rest of the team down.

Unfortunately, the problem of lack of meritocracy is widespread in Malaysia, both in the public and private sectors. For example, the affirmative action policy that is part and parcel of NEP was abused by some Malay elites to garner influence and power. In the private sectors, dominant business circles held by exclusive Chinese business associations favour only those of their own and closed their door to anyone of other ethnicities, even if the other options are better than the one they favoured. This created a government led by people who are clueless, and a racially-polarised economy.

Affirmative action policy has been the point of contention for every non-Bumiputera in the country, and the primary reason behind the wave of emigration. What made it so hard for the affirmative policy to be redefined? Not every Chinese is a cousin or daughter of Robert Kuok or Lim Goh Tong. Not every Malay is a poor sunburned farmer indebted to Felda.

Perhaps it was relevant during its initial launch, but now poverty is rife across all racial divides, given the state of the world right now. The wealth coverage is now quite different from the post-independence era, where Bumiputeras and non-Bumiputeras were really a world apart.

The statistics are different now, and to allocate affirmative assistance solely on racial basis is now wasteful and impractical. For example, when a son of a wealthy Malay businessman can get free scholarship while the son of a Chinese can-picker is denied one, surely it would create discontent.

The scholarship could be just another excuse for late-night partying by the businessman’s son, but it could mean an extra meal on the table for the can-picker’s son. From this, you can see that blind prioritising purely on racial basis can deliver wrong results even if it was made with the same goal in mind.

Meritocracy and affirmative policy are two opposing sides of a coin, but I think they must go hand in hand in Malaysia. Ensure that only the best get the position in the public and private sectors regardless of race, so that these talents can steer the nation towards the best direction.

The affirmative policy, on the other hand, needs to be redefined and reconfigured so that it applies to those that really need it based on concrete factors, namely poverty level, merit and special circumstances, instead of racial factors like what is done currently. It would need more research to get all that data, sure, but it would ensure justice for all Malaysians.

The arguments provided above represent the primary reason I stayed on; there is still hope for Malaysia, no matter how horrible the situation is, but only if you think deep enough, and only if you are game enough to face the challenge from the inside, instead of viewing passively from a comfy penthouse in Hong Kong.

Identifying our own country’s weakness and finding the way to suppress it is one way of showing I still care. The migrants always said that they migrated to find greener pastures, but then, when would there ever be greener pasture here if we don’t try to weed out the pests in our own backyard ourselves?

Some people might be scared of a few weeds and bugs and decided to go to another farm, but I know that lots of you out there still care for our own farm that is called Malaysia, no matter how smelly or how beaten up it is. Nothing beats eating produce from your own farm, right?

The arguments above are only the tip of the iceberg of what caring Malaysians can do for their country. Of course, not everyone can just meet the PM and say they want to do this and that (except Saiful Bukhari maybe?). However, you readers out there come from various fields, and you can do whatever you can to achieve the effects described above in your own ways. After all, change is not about one person, it’s about a whole nation working as one.