razaleigh.com

*In a speech I made in January this year I spoke of where we stand in our developmental path and what I felt we must do to move forward.

Revisiting the middle income trap

I would like to revisit the argument of that speech to develop it further.

We are stagnating. The signs of a low growth economy are all around us. Wages are stagnant and the cost of living is rising.

We have not made much progress in becoming a knowledge and services based economy.

According to the World Bank, Malaysia’s share of GDP contributed by services was 46.2% in 1987. Ten years later, that share had grown by a mere 0.2%
Between 1994 and 2007, real wages grew  by 2.6% in the domestic sector and by 2.8% in the export sector, which is to say, they were flat over that thirteen year period.

Meanwhile our talent scenario is an example of perverse selection at its most ruinous. We are failing to retain our own young talent, people like yourselves, let alone attract international talent to relocate here, while we have had a massive influx of unskilled foreign labour. They now make up 30-40% of our workforce. Meanwhile, alone in East Asia, the number of expatriate professionals here has decreased. Alone in East Asia, private sector wage increases follow government sector increases, instead of the other way around. We are losing doctors and scientists and have become Southeast Asia’s haven for low cost labour.

I said that we are in a middle income trap, stuck in the pattern of easy growth from low-value-added manufacture and component assembly and unable to make the leap to a knowledge-intensive economy. Regional competitors with larger, cheaper and dare I say, hungrier labour forces have emerged. China and India have risen as both lower cost and higher technology producers, and with giant domestic markets.The manufacturing sector which propelled the growth we enjoyed in the nineties is being hollowed out. There is no going back, there is no staying where we are, and we do not have a map for the way forward.

I am glad that the characterisation of Malaysia as being in a ‘middle-income-trap’ has been taken up by the government, and that the need for an economic story, or strategy, for Malaysia is now recognized.  We stand in particular need of such a model because we are a smallish economy. We cannot be good at everything, and we don’t have to be.

We need only make some reasonable bets in identifying and developing a focussed set of growth drivers. It is not difficult to see what the elements of such a growth strategy might be. Whatever we come up with should build on our natural strengths, and our strengths include the following:

We are located at the crossroads of Asia, geographically and culturally, sitting alongside the most important oil route in the world.

a)    We have large muslim, Chinese and Indian populations that connect us to the three fastest growing places in the world today.

b)    We have some of  the largest and oldest rainforests in the world, a treasure house of bio-diversity when the greatest threat facing mankind as a whole now is ecological destruction and the greatest technological advances are likely to come from bioscience.

c)    We have the English language, a common law system, parliamentary democracy,  good schools, an independent civil service and good infrastructure.

These advantages, however, are declining ones. Our cultural diversity is in danger of coming apart in bigotry, our rainforests are being logged out and planted over, our social and political institutions are decaying.

I have spoken at length on different occasions about the causes and consequences of institutional decline. The decline in our society and indeed in our natural environment, originates in a decline in our basic institutions. The link between these is corruption. The destruction of our ecosystem for example, is made possible by corrupt officials and business-people. The uncontrolled influx of unskilled labour is a direct result of corruption.

Dependencies and the young

These are problems we need to be aware of before we speak glibly about coming up with new strategies and new economic models. We need to understand where we are, and how we have gone wrong, before we can set things right.

You are young, well educated Malaysians. Many among you have left for other shores. Record numbers of Malaysians, of all races, work abroad or have migrated. Among these are some of our best people. They sense the stagnation I described. There is a certain lack of energy, ingenuity and “hunger” in the climate of this country that young people are most sensitive to. In the globalized job market, young people instinctively leave the less simulating and creative environments for those that have a spark to them.

How did we lose our spark as a nation?

We have a political economy marked by dependence on easy options and easy wealth. Like personal dependencies, these bad habits provide temporary comfort but discourage the growth of creativity and resilience.

I mentioned our dependence on low cost foreign labour.

The other dependence is something I played a part in making possible. This is a story I want to leave you with to ponder in your deliberations today.

Blessing and curse

Our nation is blessed with a modest quantity of oil reserves. As a young nation coming to terms with this natural bounty in the early 1970’s, our primary thought  was to conserve that oil. That is why, when Petronas was formed, we instituted the Petroleum Development Council. Its function was to advise the PM on how to conserve that oil and use it judicially for national development. We knew our reserves would not last long.

We saw our oil reserves as an unearned bounty that would provide the money for modernization and technology. We saw our oil within a developmental perspective. Our struggle then, was to make the leap from an economy based on commodities and low cost assembly and manufacture to a more diverse, economy based on high income jobs.

Aware that we had an insufficient tax base to make the capital investments needed to make the leap, we planned to apply oil royalties to what you would call today strategic investments in human capital. whatever money left after making cash payments, allocations for development funds, etc, was to be placed in a Heritage Fund for the future. The Heritage Fund was for education and social enrichment.

In working out the distribution of oil between the states, who had sovereign rights over it, and the Federal government, we were guided by concerns for equity between all Malaysians, a concern to develop the poorer states (who also happened to be the oil rich states) and a concern for inter-generational equity. That oil was for special development purposes and it was not just meant for our generation.

Sabah and Sarawak joined Malaya to form Malaysia because of the promise of development funds. Yet today, despite being their massive resources, they are some of our poorest states.

Instead of being our ace up the sleeve, however, our oil wealth became in effect a swag of money used to fund the government’s operational expenditure, to bail out failing companies, buy arms, build grandiose cities in the middle of nowehere. Instead of helping eradicate poverty in the poorest states, our oil wealth came to be channeled into our political and politically linked class. Instead of being the patrimony of all Malaysians, and for our children, it is used as a giant slush fund that has propped up authoritarian rule, eroded constitutional democracy and corrupted our entire political and business class.

Our oil receipts, instead of being applied in the manner we planned upon the formation of Petronas, that is, according to its original developmental purpose, became a fund for the whims and fancy of whoever ran the country, without any accountability.

The oil that was meant to spur our transition to a more humane, educated society has instead become a narcotic that provides economic quick fixes and hollow symbols such as the Petronas Towers. Our oil wealth was meant to help us foster Malaysians capable of building the Twin Towers than hire foreigners to build them, a practice in which we preceded Dubai.  I would rather have good government than grand government buildings filled with a demoralized civil service.

It is no wonder that we are no longer productive, no longer using our ingenuity to devise ways to improve ourselves and leap forward.

Malaysia is now  an “oil curse” country.**

When I started Petronas in 1974, I did not realize I would see the day when I would wish we had not uncovered such bounty.

The story I have told is a reminder of the scale of the challenge of development. My generation of young people faced this challenge in the 1960’s and 70’s. You face it now. The story tells us that development is about far more than picking strategies out of a box.

You have kindly invited me to address a seminar on strategies for reinventing and liberalizing Malaysia’s economy. But the story of our squandered oil wealth reminds us that it was not for want of resources or strategies that we floundered. Our failure has been political and moral. We have allowed greed and resentment to drive our politics and looked the other way or even gone along while public assets have been stolen in broad daylight.

I encourage you to take up  the cause of national development with the ingenuity that earlier generations of Malaysians brought to this task, but the beginning of our journey must be a return to the basics of public life: the rule of law, honesty, truth-telling  and the keeping of promises.

The Malaysia we need to recover is one that was founded on laws and led with integrity. With the hindsight of history we know such things are fragile and can be overturned in one generation, forgotten the next.  Without a living foundation in the basics you might sense an air of unreality around our talk of reinventing ourselves, coming up with a new economic model, and liberalizing our economy.

So before we can reinvent ourselves we need to recover our nation. That larger community, bound by laws, democratic and constitutional,  is the context of economic progress, it is the context in which young people find hope, think generous thoughts and create tomorrow.

–

*Opening speech at

THE 1ST YOUNG CORPORATE MALAYSIANS SUMMIT

“Reinventing and liberalising malaysia’s economy:strategy and directions”

Saturday, December 12, 2009

—-

**The resource curse thesis

The idea that natural resources might be more an economic curse than a blessing began to emerge in the 1980s. In this light, the term resource curse thesis was first used by Richard Auty in 1993 to describe how countries rich in natural resources were unable to use that wealth to boost their economies and how, counter-intuitively, these countries had lower economic growth than countries without an abundance of natural resources. Numerous studies, including one by Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner, have shown a link between natural resource abundance and poor economic growth. This disconnect between natural resource wealth and economic growth can be seen by looking at an example from the petroleum-producing countries. From 1965-1998, in the OPEC countries, gross national product per capita growth decreased on average by 1.3%, while in the rest of the developing world, per capita growth was on average 2.2%. Some argue that financial flows from foreign aid can provoke effects that are similar to the resource curse.

(Wikipedia: “Resource curse“)

HUMAN RIGHTS DAY*

December 10 marks the 61^st Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights “in recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family”

Proclaimed at the end of war that had witnessed “barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind”, it recognized that such acts came out of a disregard and contempt for human rights. It recognized human rights as “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”

Human rights are defined against or at least with respect to the powers of the state. They are “international norms that help to protect all people everywhere from severe political, legal, and social abuses.” More often than not, human rights are meant to protect individuals and minorities from governments and majorities.

Human rights are often defined in the negative, that is to say, they often define what may not be done to individuals. The basic rights of right to life, liberty and security of person are rights not to be interfered with in certain ways. Such rights are defined as limits upon the powers of the state, articulated after a World War in which it had become clear to all the world that state-sponsored brutality had plumbed new depths of barbarism.

The declaration also defines political and civil rights. Although defined in legal terms, these rights are  universal, whether or not they have been enacted in any particular jurisdiction.

The declaration defines political, civil and social rights but also rights to a certain standard of living (Article 25) and to education (Article 26).

The language of human rights is legal and abstract, but the human dignity and equality it aims to uphold take shape in the real world through institutions and practices. The fundamental rights it champions must be enacted and protected by the organs, arms and agencies of the state. The substantive rights it guarantees must be delivered by government.

Human rights thus require a framework of good government in order to be more than paper guarantees.

Whatever the specific features of the government under which people live, their human rights will not be assured without the government itself abiding by certain basic principles, and being subject to the rule of law.

Let me just draw on some examples from my experience.

The tender committee

One of the basic functions of government is stewardship of the resources of a nation. In truth every nation has the natural, cultural and human resources to provide for the basic wellbeing of all its citizens. Even in famine, people usually starve not because there is not enough food in the country as a whole, but because their entitlements to it have broken down. In an age of abundance, poverty and shortage are social and political rather than natural problems.  There is no evading our common responsibility for them. Where people are in want, weak government is almost always at the heart of the problem.

The government’s ability to provide for the basic necessities of its citizens is directly tied to its ability to be a transparent custodian of the nation’s resources. This custodianship is expressed through good practices. These good practices are only sustainable in an ethos of trusteeship.

Malaysia has suffered a worrying decline in both.

Let me cite some examples.

The tender committee

Of late in Malaysia it has become common to speak of the “negotiated tender”, the “direct nego.”  When this term first started being bandied about in the 1980’s I couldn’t understand it.  It had never existed before in our system of government.

I do not understand what kind of legal loophole was employed to make this aberration the new norm in government procurement.

What I do understand is that since Independence in 1957, and up to the time I served as Minister of Finance, the open tender was about the only way the government  could procure anything.

It was ingrained in the civil service that all government procurement must be done in a visible manner and with the proper controls to ensure independence and effectiveness in procurement.

The Ministry of Finance ensured that all procurement was done through a system of tenders.

In the first instance, any tenderer must be pre-qualified and any submission must conform with specifications laid down by the technical and financial committee in consultation with prospective users.

Vendors had to be pre-qualified before they were allowed to submit a tender.

Thereafter their submission must meet basic specifications.

The tender committee was formed and managed with the utmost concern for independence. The committee would sit at a moment’s notice when the government had something to procure. All tender documents were coded and distributed to the members of the tender committee first thing in the morning. The members were isolated and given three or four hours to study the documents. Technical and financial advisors would be on hand to explain the technicalities to the decision-makers.

Immediately after the committee had decided,  their decision on who the contract had been awarded to would be conveyed not only to the people who had participated in the tendering process, but to the public.

I have belaboured the details of the process because the details represent careful controls and checks through which the government exercised its custodianship of public resources.  The committee was given no advance notice, was physically isolated, and had to work quickly in order to prevent communication with interested parties. The results had to be announced publicly immediately to prevent retrospective interventions with them.

Secrecy and publicity were deployed to ensure the integrity and transparency of the process. Contrast the uses of secrecy today, backed by the Official Secrets Act, to prevent the public from knowing how much has been stolen from them and by whom.

Public service as trusteeship

Good practices do not exist in a vacuum. They can only be applied by public officials who have had it ingrained in them that they hold their positions in trust for the entire rakyat. Not for themselves, their party or their community. Good practice in public service requires an ethos of public service as trusteeship.

My late father was a senior government official. He had an official car given by the government. He never used the car to go to the club, nor would he allow us children to go to school in it.  If we had to go by car, we went in his personal car. If he must go to the club, he would come home and change cars and drivers, so that car and driver were personal. The car belonged to the government and the petrol in the car was paid for by the government. If you went for private function you used your own petrol and was driven by your personal driver.

I can remember being in his official car once. I jumped into it to go to the Sultan’s birthday celebration parade. He relented because he was going to an official function. What a thrill. He was very strict about these things.

Later, whether in business or government it was unthinkable for me not to apply the same practices. These practices were a kind of basic hygiene as unremarkable and ingrained as the habit, say, of washing one’s hands before a meal.

My experience was typical of public servants of my generation. Those of you acquainted with retired senior civil servants will recognize the type of person I am talking about. They lived and breathed this ethos.

Now we see politicians using official vehicles with no regard and indeed no understanding of the distinction between private and public assets. Their wives go shopping in government transportation.

I have gone on about these details because faithfulness in small things begets faithfulness in large things. It is in the details that the spirit of trusteeship is cultivated and passed on.

Public trusteeship and human rights

What is the relevance of this to human rights?

Good practices and a strict ethos of trusteeship in respect of public assets is important because they are a safeguard against corruption, and the biggest challenge to the full enjoyment of human rights by all in Malaysia is corruption.

As a result of corruption, stadiums collapse, bridges fall down, people die unnecessarily on roads not built to specification. As a result of corruption, communities and individuals in our midst suffer malnutrition, are deprived of education, are trafficked like slaves, die in official custody. As a result of corruption, the voiceless are exploited or neglected: vulnerable children, migrant workers, Orang Asli, and the interior-dwelling people of Sabah and Sarawak.

The people who bear the highest responsibility for this crime are people in high positions, both official and commercial, engaged in an elaborate game which in reality is simply about stealing public assets.  These are people who expect and exact respect from the public, when their deeds costs people their livelihoods, their health and their lives, diminishes human prospects, blights the future of our children.

The rule of law and human rights

The most important safeguard of human rights is the rule of law. The ultimate safeguard of our human rights in Malaysia is the Constitution. A Constitution is a living thing only when it is instutionalised as a living practice. It needs judges, public officials and civil society who are committed to upholding and protecting it without fear or favour.

When the Constitution is ignored or contravened by the Government of the day, and by officials sworn to uphold it, this foundational institution is injured, the rule of law is undermined, and there is a little less standing between each Malaysian and the barbarism  against which the Universal Declaration was proclaimed.

Our Constitution was flouted in Perak this year when its legitimate government was replaced by unconstitutional and undemocratic means. This was a violation of the rule of law. As this action was promoted and endorsed by the highest authorities, it damaged the people’s confidence in the rule of law, in democratic governance and in our constitutional monarchy.

The Universal Declaration on Human Rights which we celebrate today draws on the searing experience of the Great Wars of the twentieth century. An unforgettable impression left by that war is that the tissue between ourselves and barbarism is thin indeed, woven from the fragile thread of values, institutions and practices.

The Universal Declaration expresses the inherent dignity of the human person, and declares his inalienable right to life and liberty in the language of human rights.  Those values are ancient and near universal, but the modern language of rights is now indispensable for discussing them.

Our founding Prime Minister, the late Tunku Abdul Rahman, understood this. He had wanted to have the UNDHR inserted as a supplement to our Constitution. I am not sure what prevented him from doing so, but it is clear from his conduct and from his statements that he shared its ethos. The “founding fathers” of this young country, who were of the generation that saw the founding of the UN and the formulation of the Universal Declaration, shared this ethos.  To remind ourselves of the spirit in which we began, and the ethos we must now fight to recover, I would like to end with the beginning of the speech that Tunku gave upon the formation of Malaysia on September 16, 1963:

THE great day we have long awaited has come at last – the birth of Malaysia. In a warm spirit or joy and hope, 10 million people of many races in all the States of Malaya, Singapore, Sarawak and Sabah now join hands in freedom and unity.

We do so because we know that we have come together through our own free will and desire in the true spirit of brotherhood and love of freedom.

–

*Speech delivered at a seminar on human rights organized by the UNDP on Dec 8 at the Renaissance Hotel, KL

There are some good things about our country which we do not acknowledge either because are too obvious or because it is politically incorrect to do so. One of these is the role played by British institutions in our country.

The Federation of Malaya and later Malaysia did not emerge from the colonial era through violent struggle. Our independence was negotiated, and the Constitution which grounds our existence was built out of consensus. We took an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary path.  This is not to deny or downplay the political struggle leading up to independence.

In the last three decades, however, as the political discourse in this country has taken a more ethno-nationalist and authoritarian tone, there has been an associated tendency to paint present-day Malaysia as a violent rupture with the past.  Nationalism glorifies the fight and undervalues the much harder, rarer accomplishment of coming to an understanding, forging a consensus, building a nation. This is a common and understandable tendency in the way postcolonial nations talk about their past, but it has obscured an aspect of our history which distinguishes us among the states and was an important source of our early success as a nation.

This aspect is that in coming to independence in an orderly and negotiated settlement, we retained intact the best of what we already had and did not have to start from some imagined Ground Zero or mythologized past.

The best of what we already had, come 1957 and 1963, were a set of viable modern institutions practices and skills:  the Westminster model of Parliamentary democracy, civil law grounded in a Constitution,  a capable and independent civil service, including an excellent teaching service, armed forces and police, good schools, sophisticated trade practices and markets, financial markets, and modern methods of management such as those applied in our plantation sector. We were already a functioning country integrated into global markets. The challenges of development and nation-building were serious, but we faced them with an independent judiciary, a professional civil service and a well-defined set of relationships between a Federal Government and our individually sovereign states. Indeed we were able to face these challenges because these institutions functioned well.

Institutionally, we had a good start as a nation.  Why is it important to recall this?

For one it makes sense of the feeling among many Malaysians and  international friends who have observed Malaysia over a longer period that Malaysia has seen better days. There is a feeling of wasted promise, of having lost our way, or declined beyond the point of no return.

This feeling is too sharp, and too pervasive to be put down to the nostalgia of always finding “the good old days best.” The illusion of nostalgia doesn’t explain why we are losing our best and brightest. Those who can stay away and settle overseas do so, with the encouragement of their parents. Their parents tell them to remain where they are, there is nothing for them here. The illusion of nostalgia does not explain why parents fight to send their children to private and international schools rather than the national schools they themselves went to. The very same politicians who recite nationalist slogans about our national schools and turn the curriculum into an ideological hammer send their own children to international schools here or in Australia and Britain. They know better than anyone else the shape our schools are in. It is no illusion that people do not have the faith in our judiciary and police that they once had.

Malaysians are losing faith in their future despite the evidence of material progress around us, despite being a relatively successful country. We have lots of infrastructure. Lots of malls and highways. Especially toll highways. It is not for want of physical infrastructure, dubious as some of it is, that we feel we languish. It is a sense that we are losing the institutional infrastructure of civilized society.

That infrastructure, whether indigenous or acquired, was already in place at independence. Having secured our political independence through a consultative and deliberative process, we were well placed to build upon this foundation. We had a complex system of laws, conventions and practices but crucially we had the people capable of understanding and administering such a system. We had a civil service and a political class trained and socialized into the practices of the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy. Core principles of accountability, check and balance and independence were lodged in the habits, thought patterns and behaviour of our civil servants and judges.

If Malaysians feel a sense of loss, tell their children not to come home from overseas, or are making plans to emigrate, it is not because they do not love this country or are ungrateful for tarred roads and bridges. It is because they feel the erosion of the institutional infrastructure of our society. Institutional intangibles such as the rule of law, accountability and transparency are the basis of a people’s confidence in their society.

We have gone through a period of forgetting about the importance of our core institutions. It is time to remember again. Many of these are British institutions. Cultural progress is a story of borrowing, adaptation and learning. The vitality of this part of the world, that for all recorded history has been the maritime crossroads of East and South Asia and the Middle East, is based on material and cultural exchange, borrowing and adaptation. It would be cultural and economic suicide for us to pretend otherwise.

It is time we shed the crude nationalism which refuses to acknowledge things “not invented here”.  This country had a great start in life because we had inherited a system of laws, rights and conventions that had been refined over more than seven hundred years. We inherited a civil service that for all its woes continues to keep the ship of state afloat despite the sometimes irresponsible actions of politicians. We inherited the English language, and with that a strong set of links to the English speaking world.  The eminence of tonight’s assembly testifies to the great value of our educational ties to Britain.

We acknowledge and celebrate our ties to British education and British institutions not out of sentimentality but out of an understanding that these are foundational influences that have had much to do with stability and competitiveness as a nation. British educational, administrative, legal and cultural institutions continue to be of vital importance to us as Malaysians. We need to affirm these links without political blinkers, understand their cultural, political and economic importance to us, and build on them. One result of such a change of attitude should be a rethinking of our attitude to the English language. By now it is also a Malaysian language. It would be sheer hypocrisy to deny its value and centrality to us as Malaysians. Do we continue to deny in political rhetoric what we practice in reality, or do we grasp the situation and come up with better policies for the teaching and adoption of the language?

Rather than indulge in grand schemes of cultural “import substitution” we should appreciate the extent of these influences and links and explore ways to develop them further.

We should acknowledge that by the time of Independence we already had a string of excellent schools in major towns across the country. These include Penang Free School, The Royal Military College, The Malay College, St John’s Institution, Victoria Institution, Muar High School and my alma mater Anderson High School. These schools nurtured a generation of multiracial leaders who were completely at home with each other despite coming from different backgrounds.  This comfort with each other was the basis of their ability to work with one another. We have let these schools become mediocre, at great cost to the quality of our leadership and in a way that imperils our unity. It is time to restore them to their former eminence.

The world has not stayed still. We should look at matters such as Parliamentary reform and the reform of the civil service with an eye to what is going on in Britain as it faces the challenges of European integration and its transformation into an increasingly multicultural society. At both the institutional and people to people level, we should connect with Britain as it is today, a fast changing society facing many of the same problems we do, rather than recycle stale colonial era stereotypes.

 

Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah

*Speech delivered at British Graduates Association 22nd Anniversary Dinner

Nov 1, 2009, Berjaya Times Square Hotel, Kuala Lumpur

How kind of The Star to editorialise some words their reporter overheard while I was speaking to a Singapore news channel into a sweet little retirement story for me, complete with a helpful coda about my retiring into harmless “constructive” political commentary.

I am sorry to disappoint these aspiring scriptwriters but news of my departure is premature. Among the things I am pushing for in my undead condition is the repeal of the Printing Presses and Publications Act which, by protecting a small number of licensee newspapers from competition, and keeping them leashed to political masters, has given us the kind of lapdog journalism you see quoted below.

I made my call for the repeal of the PPPA in a speech on Friday, a message that one mainstream newspaper did not find as newsworthy as the observation that I am going through the novel process of “ageing” (as opposed to just being “old”); and the fabrication that I have given up an option some people find inconvenient.

I may be a little too “old” to be patronised by supine newspaper editors.

——
Ageing Ku Li gives up on Umno top post

By IAN MCINTYRE

The Star

19 October 2009

KUALA LUMPUR: After three decades of mounting challenges for the Umno presidency, Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah has decided to give up the fight finally.

“I am too old. Too old,” he said when asked at the sidelines of the recent Umno special general assembly on whether he would consider contesting for the post with the quota system now abolished.

“I think it is time to give a younger person a chance,” he said.

However, the Kelantan prince will continue to be an active political commentator, providing insights into history as well as constructive criticism of both Barisan Nasional and the Opposition.

At the age of 72, he is the longest serving parliamentarian and Umno divisional leader but Tengku Razaleigh is likely to be featured in the annals of Umno history as the “nearly man.”

He came within a whisker of becoming party president at the infamous 1987 party elections, which eventually saw the party de-registered by the courts and the imposition of a quota system.

Tengku Razaleigh had also mooted a campaign in the recent party elections to contest the presidency against both Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi and current president Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak.

He could only muster one nomination which was from his own Gua Musang Umno division.

The quota system was introduced to rein in excessive jostling for posts besides preventing the party from being taken to courts but instead, some exploited the loopholes for their own benefits and gave rise to the Umno divisional heads to become “warlords”.

Known as a “gentleman politician”, Tengku Razaleigh is someone who enjoyed ties with the who’s who among the nations politicians and headed Semangat 46, a splinter of the original Umno which broke up in 1987.

“I am a loyalist but if Umno does not heed the change for structural changes, I may reconsider (about the prospects of joining another party),” he added.

I am honoured that you have asked me to address you today. I am not a scholar. All I can offer today are the personal views of a Malaysian who has seen a little of the history of this marvelous country, and tried to play my part in it.

I say a marvelous country, because Malaysia, for all its frustrations and perils, is truly special, truly beautiful. We are a coming together of communities, cultures, traditions and religions unlike anything anywhere else.  It is not in political sloganeering or in tourist jingos that we find our special nature. We recover it only by paying attention to the concrete details of our everyday life and our particular history. Wonder is found in the details.

Remembering our stories

Let me tell you a story:

I grew up in Kota Bharu. My father was fond of Western cuisine and had a Hainanese cook who prepared the dishes he enjoyed.

One day, while the cook was feeding the tigers in our home, a piece of meat got stuck in between the bars of the cage. –  I should explain that we had a mini zoo in our home. My father was fond of animals and we shared a home with tigers, a bear, crocodiles and other creatures in the compound. The animals were very fond of my father. The tigers would come up to him to have their backs stroked. The bear would accompany him on his walks around the garden.  The crocodiles made their escape in one of Kota Bharu’s annual floods, which I always remember as a happy time because of the water sports it made possible. My father sent us out to look for them. What he expected us to do when we found them I am not sure. –

To return to my story, one day the cook was feeding the tigers, and a piece of meat got stuck between the bars of the cage. The cook tried to dislodge it. As he did so, he failed to notice the tiger. The tiger swatted his hand. Within twenty four hours, our poor cook was dead from the infection caused by the wound.

Our family was in grief. He was dear to us all.  He had no known relatives. So my father took it upon himself to arrange a full Chinese funeral for the cook, complete with a brass band and procession, and invited all the cook’s friends. We children followed in respect as the process wove its way through the town.

Your own stories, if you recall the actual details, will be no less strange than my own. Some of the details here might scandalize people in these supposedly more enlightened times. They don’t fit into the trimmed down, sloganized narratives of who we are and how we came to be. This is over the years we have allowed politics to tell us who we are and how we should remember ourselves. We have let political indoctrination, jingoism, and a rising tide of bad taste overcome our memory of ourselves. We have let  newspapers, textbooks and even university courses paint a crude picture of who we are, what we fear and what we hope for.  This depletes our culture, but there is also a political consequence:

The picture that our current politics paints of us is devoid of wonder, and therefore of possibility.

Our politics has become an enemy of our sense of wonder. Instead it has sown doubt, uncertainty and fear. These are disabling emotions. It is not by accident that authoritarian regimes everywhere begin their subjugation of people by cutting them off from their past. Systematically, they replace the richly textured memories of a community that make people independent, inquisitive and open with prefabricated tales that weaken them into subjugation through fear and anxiety. They destroy the markers of memory, the checks and balances of tradition and institution, and replace them with a manufactured set of images all pointing to a centralized power.

Our path to  the recovery of a sense of nationhood is not through an equally crude reaction, but through a retrieval of our personal and collective memory of living in this blessed land and sharing it each other. The work done by the contributors to this volume are part of a civilizing project to bring to light the fine detail of who we are, against the politicised and commercialised caricatures that have made our racialised politics seem natural and inevitable.

Our own stories, individually and as a country, are full of curious processions, walking bears, and escaped crocodiles. We should begin to wonder again at this amazing country we find ourselves sharing. In that wonder we shall recover what it is we love about being who we are, who we are amongst, and we shall more fiercely defend not just our own, but each others’ freedoms.

A Constitution of Consensus

One place for us to begin this process together is our Federal Constitution.

The spirit in which Malaysia came to be is captured in our Constitution. At the moment of our independence, Malaysia possessed firm foundations in the rule of law and was permeated with a spirit of constitutionalism.

The pledge contained within the proclamation of Independence says that “…with God’s blessing [Malaysia] shall be forever a sovereign democratic and independent State founded upon the principles of liberty and justice and ever seeking the welfare and happiness of its people and the maintenance of a just peace among all nations.”

The Constitution is the ultimate safeguard of our fundamental liberties. These are liberties which cannot be taken away.

One view put out by those who are impatient with these safeguards is that our Constitution is an external and Western imposition upon us, that it is the final instrument of colonialism. People have drawn on this view to subject the Constitution to some higher or prior principle,  be it race, religion or royalty. Of course, the proponents of such views tend to identify themselves with these higher principles in order to claim extra-constitutional powers. These are transparent attempts at revisionism which erode the supremacy of the Constitution. We should have the confidence to reject such moves politely but firmly, whoever advocates them, whatever their social or religious status.

The truth is that our Constitution was built by a deliberately consultative process aimed at achieving consensus. The Reid Commission was proposed by a constitutional conference in London attended by four representatives of the Malay Rulers, the Chief Minister of the Federation, Tunku Abdul Rahman and three other ministers, and also by the British High Commissioner in Malaya and his advisers.  This conference proposed the appointment of an independent commission to devise a constitution for a fully self-governing and independent Federation of Malaya. Their proposal was accepted by the Malay Rulers and Queen Elizabeth.

The Reid Commission met 118 times in Kuala Lumpur between June and October 1956, and received 131 memoranda from various individuals and organisations. The commission submitted its working draft on 21 February 1957, which was scrutinised by a Working Committee. The Working Committee consisted of four representatives from the Malay rulers, another four from the Alliance government, the British High Commissioner, the Chief Secretary, and the Attorney General.

On the basis of their recommendations, the new Federal Constitution was passed by the Federal Legislative Council on August 15, 1957, and the Constitution took effect on August 27.

As you can tell from this narrative, the Commission solicited the views of all sections of our society and had, throughout, the support and participation of the Malay Rulers and the Alliance government. The process preserved the sovereignty of the Malay Rulers

The resulting document, like all things man-made, remains perfectible, but most certainly it is ours. It brought our nation into being, and it is our document.

The question of whether the Federation should be an islamic state, for example, was considered and rejected by the Rulers and by the representatives of the people. Had we wanted to be ruled by syariah, the option was on the shelf, so to speak, and could easily have been taken, because prior to this the states were ruled by the Sultans according to syariah law. The fact that we have a constitution governed by common law is not an accident nor an external imposition. We chose to found our nation on a secular constitution after consultation and deliberation.

Our country was built on the sophisticated and secure foundation of a Constitution that we formed for ourselves. For us to continue to grow up as a country we need to own, understand and defend it.

Sadly part of the memory we have lost is of our Constitution and of the nature of that Constitution. Today, in the aftermath of the scene-shifting election results of March 2008,  people are restless and uneasy about the ethnic relations, and about their future. There is a sense of anxiety about our nation that is often translated into fear of ethnic conflict.

I think we should not fear. On an inviolable foundation of equal citizenship, the rights of each and every community are protected. These protections are guaranteed in the Constitution. What we should be uneasy about is not so much ethnic discord, which is often manufactured for political ends and has little  basis in the daily experience of our citizens, but the subversion of our Constitution. Such subversion is only possible if we forget that this Constitution belongs to us, protects us all, and underwrites our nationhood and we fail to defend it.

Our country had a happy beginning in being built on firm foundations in the rule of law. A strong spirit of constitutionalism guided our early decades. The components of that spirit are respect and understanding for the rule of law, and the upholding of justice and liberty. That spirits is antithetical to communal bickering and small-minded squabbling over fixed pie notions of education, economy or whatever. That spirit has declined and with it has come all kinds of unease. It is time we recovered it. With its recovery will come our confidence as a nation once more.

The political framework of this country cries out for reform. But reform is not about the blind embrace of the new. That would be to fly from disorder to confusion. Our path to reform must come from a recovery of  the “old” living spirit of Constitutionalism, and the “old” values of freedom and justice, and the “old” memories each of us carries in themselves of what is good about our nation.

So far I have spoken more generally about principles. I want to turn now to some examples of how these can work out in pursuing particular reforms.

National reform must begin with reform of our party system. This is because one of the chief reasons this nation is sick is that we have a diseased party system. A diagnosis of the disease of the party system finds that the parties are sick because they have strayed from from the Constitutional principles that govern them (they are subject to the Societies Act). In doing so they have become undemocratic. In becoming undemocratic they have lost legitimacy. In losing legitimacy they have lost public support and the ability to rejuvenate themselves. The cure, surely is for them to conform themselves again to constitutional principles.

I have warned that Umno, like any other political party that has been in power for so long, must reform, or it will be tossed out by the people. The people themselves have had a taste of the power of their free vote. They know that parties and governments answer to the people, and not vice versa, they want a repeal of draconian laws, and they have lost patience with corruption. They seek accountability, justice and rule of law. The people are ahead of the government of the day, but the principles they want to see applied are universal, and they are enshrined in our Constitution.
It is not just Umno that needs to reform. The entire political system needs to change, to be in greater conformity with our Constitution and in the spirit of the Rukun Negara, which says from these diverse elements of our population, we are dedicated to the achievement of a united nation in which loyalty and dedication to the nation shall over-ride all other loyalties.’”

We should not expect our political parties to reform of their own accord. Leaders who owe their position to undemocratic  rules and practices are the last people to accept reform. The people must demand it. I say we need a movement embraced by people at all levels and from every quarter of our rakyat, to establish a national consensus on how our political parties should conduct themselves from now on. In the spirit of the Rukun Negara, That consensus should be based on a set of principles such as the following:

1. All political parties are required to include in their constitutional objectives the equality of citizenship as provided for in the Federal Constitution.

2. An economic and political policy that political parties propagate must not discriminate against any citizen.

3. All parties shall include and uphold constitutional democracy and the separation of powers as a fundamental principle.

4. It shall be the duty of all political parties to adhere to the objectives of public service and refrain from involvement in business, and ensure the separation of business from political parties.

5. It shall be the duty of all political parties to ensure and respect the independence of the judiciary and the judicial process.

6. All parties shall ensure that the party election system will adhere to the highest standards of conduct, and also ensure that the elections are free of corrupt practices.  Legislation should be considered to provide funding of political parties.

7. It shall be the duty of all parties to ensure that all political dialogues and statements will not create racial or religious animosity.

8. All parties undertake not to use racial and communal agitation as political policies.

9. To remove and eradicate all barriers that hinder national unity and Malaysian identity.

10. To uphold the Federal and State Constitutions and its democratic intent and spirit, the Rule of Law, and the fundamental liberties as enshrined in Part II of the Malaysian Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

What we need now is the rise of an empowered public. Democracy in Malaysia is fragile so long as public opinion remains weak. Our hope for a more democratic future depends on our ability to build a strong public opinion. It’s good news that a vigorous body of public opinion, aided by information and  communication technologies, is in making on the internet. I myself rely on it through my blog. If not for my blog, what I say would scarcely get out in the mainstream media. We need a freedom of information act, and I call for the repeal of the Printing Presses Act. It is silly that we limit the number of newspapers while every person with a blog or a twitter account can publish to the world. In limiting the printed media we have only succeeded in dumbing it down, so that those who rely only on the printed mass media and the terrestrial broadcast channels are actually the poorer for it.

Race and hope

Let end by returning to the theme of racial harmony. I repeat: the constitutional guarantees are ironclad.  We ought to feel secure in the Constitution’s protections of our rights. A free people must be a secure people.

Another story:

In 1962, when I was a delegate to the United Nations, the Late Tun Ismail and I went out one evening to a posh restaurant on New York’s East Side. The maitre d’ turned us away firmly. No, he said, the restaurant was closed for a private function.  We could see clearly that the restaurant was open. We understood that we were being denied entry because were “coloured”. This is despite the fact that our reservation had been made UN’s offices.

Today, in 2009, an African American man is President of the United States. He has just won the Nobel Peace Prize. In 46 years, and well within my lifetime, how far things have come. Had you told me in 1962, after that incident, that a black man would be president in my life time, I would not have believed you. This change did not happen without struggle.

From Leo Tolstoy to Henry Thoreau to Ghandi to Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela,  we see a thread of conviction about the overriding ethical claim of our common humanity. It is more important that we are alike in being sons and daughters of God than that we are different. This is also the thread of a spirit and method of resistance.  Where all reasonable persuasion fails, the final “No” to wrongdoing, the place at which the citizen stands up to defend something fundamental, is through peaceful resistance. I allude to this only as a reminder of the final redoubt of the free citizen. Things may or may not have come to such a bad state that we must rise in this fashion, but let us be conscious of the power we hold in knowing just who we are and what we are capable of as ordinary citizens.
If the authorities do what is unjust, ride roughshod over constitutional rights and deny the sovereignty of the rakyat and the primacy of our constitution, we rest secure in the knowledge that history shows us that the just cause, defended stoutly, persistently and peacefully, will prevail. And sooner than we might expect.

–

Keynote speech on the launch of the book, Multi-ethnic Malaysia

UCSI University, Cheras, October 16, 2009

Here are five proposals for the reform of the Umno Constitution that I have advocated for some time now:

1. The president, deputy president, vice presidents and members of the supreme council  to be elected directly.  This ends the delegate system.
2. State party chiefs to be elected by the membership at state level, not appointed by the president.
3. The nominations quotas to be abolished
4. Parliamentary candidates to be nominated by their Divisions, not by the party president.
5. Top office holders in the party to refrain from holding top government positions.
   (This is to separate party politics from the public responsibilities of government)
   

I explained in a blog posting in February this year that the above amendments were necessary if the party were serious about tackling internal corruption. These proposals also aimed to:

1. decentralize power in Umno, and make it a grassroots driven party again
2. restore democracy to Umno, and thereby its legitimacy
3. make Umno accountable, and thereby more responsive to its members and the rakyat
4. separate Umno’s internal political processes from the service we perform to the nation in government
5. open the doors to young people of talent and energy, thereby revitalizing the party and giving it a future

*Below are my answers to a set of questions posed to me last week by The Nut Graph. The interview is written up here.

Tengku, Umno President Datuk Seri Najib has already said the next party election would involve all 191 Umno divisions, with around 60,000 individuals voting. There are proposals to stretch this number to 650,000. What do you think about these proposed changes?

I don’t see why we are working ourselves into a sweat over this. There is a very basic principle at stake here: each and every member of Umno who has paid his RM1 subscription has the right to have a direct say in who represents him as President. Either we accept this principle, or we don’t. Are we afraid of our own members?

Among the amendments talked about of course, is also changing the nomination quota for the party’s top posts. Najib secured the presidency uncontested because you, his only declared opponent, had been unable to secure the 58 necessary nominations. Your feelings on this?

They shouldn’t just talk about it. They should do it. The nomination quota is an undemocratic and unconstitutional restriction. It is against the founding spirit of the party, which was open and grassroots driven.

What about the talk on restrictions for those vying for top posts – i.e. having to serve a minimum number of years at a certain level before contesting a higher post. Do you think this delay the rise of new talent within the party?

Every member of the party has a right to vote for his leaders. Every member of the party has the right to contest any position in the party. These are rights guaranteed by the Federal Constitution. Every society (and a political party is a society) is bound by the Federal Constitution through the Societies Act to apply these principles. It’s not just a matter of delaying talent, which of course it does. It’s about doing the right thing.

Tengku, do you think these proposed amendments will only be cosmetic or will they truly be able to bring about meaningful reform in Umno? Will it make a difference?

I proposed these amendments because I believe they will open the way to reform. Of course there are attempts to restrict their scope by imposing arcane restrictions on who can contest, etc. To ordinary party members these just look like self-serving attempts by the incumbents to block renewal. Umno needs a renewal of leadership, and that change must be driven once again by its ordinary members. Everybody knows this.

What else do you think needs to be done or looked into to bring about change within the party with regards to the constitutional changes?

Let’s just see if the Party leadership will allow these elementary reforms. Either we comply with the Federal Constitution and behave like a lawful, democratic party or we continue to waffle about reform. There is no other way to recover the trust of the people, and indeed of our own members.

–