The ‘Better Malaysia Assembly’ is an illusion that’s being foisted on the body politic by the delusionist Nazir Razak.
Nazir has enlisted 54 supposedly eminent persons for nothing less than the task of resetting the socio-economic postulates of the country that everyone except the sleepwalking know is going downhill and pretty fast.
The list he has selected, rather arbitrarily, sports a few worthies, but most, including Nazir, have fed at the public trough the past several decades.
Just as poachers cannot make credible gamekeepers, so past beneficiaries of structural disparities cannot be plausible reformulators.
This is not the only aspect of Nazir’s delusions.
Parliament is the legitimate arena for the debate and generation of initiatives such as Nazir’s attempt at resetting the country’s coordinates.
He appears blasé about this nuance and his appeal to the King and Conference of Rulers to approve his initiative is an attempt to involve a group whose role in the overall constitutional framework is necessarily apolitical.
Nazir is the kind of guy who, on a nostalgic recent trip to his alma mater, could remark that he found the enrolment to be 96% Malay and 4% Indian, very unlike the ethnically plural enrolments of the 1970s when he was in school.
He didn’t say he found the lopsidedness a matter for lament. He didn’t speculate as to the causes of the disproportion, but then grandees are adept at ignoring elephants in the room.
Does this reticence equip him to lead an effort aimed at something as far reaching like a national reset?
Perhaps he felt that since indirection is the preferred Malay mode when dealing with sensitive subjects, it’s best to rely on inference rather than plain speaking about cause and effect of the phenomena he’s observed.
Such an attitude will not help the effort to analyse the causes of Malaysia’s economic and political decline, in a spiral that appears irreversible.
Members of the council of advisers that Nazir has assembled are not known for calling out the main culprits for the decline: the increasing Islamisation of laws and administration, and wide diffusion of the concept of Malay dominance.
Over the past four decades the politics and discourse of the country have revolved increasingly and obsessively around the two quiddities which, like a spread of butter on bread, allows nothing to breathe through the pores.
Only a very brave person would call out the two factors. Even if the discussions among the council are held in private, it would take an intrepid member to raise them as issues.
Using the Malay device of indirection would water down the salience of the two factors as contributors to the atrophy of the country’s strengths.
It helps to be reminded that reports produced by past assemblies of consultative and study groups for national correction and rejuvenation have been swept into oblivion.
In 1990-91, the National Economic Consultative Council (NECC) met over a two-year period to discuss a replacement for the expiring New Economic Policy, first introduced in January 1971 for a 20-year period.
The NECC came up with a few constructive proposals, such as creating a monitoring council and an ombudsman. Its report was never published and the only thing of note that came out of it was the privatisation of higher education.
In 2005, a royal commission on the management of the police force, after a 15-month study, fared a little better than the NECC.
It was able to publish its report but its signal recommendation, the proposed creation of the Independent Police Complaints and Misconduct Commission, was mothballed.
To this day, there are recurrent calls for the creation of the commission but the cabal of senior police officers who stiff-armed the proposal in 2005 has ready recruits to their obstructionist cause.
A Council of Elders, set up by the Pakatan Harapan government after it came into power in May 2018, prepared a report to help the cause of good governance. That study did not see the light of day.
In Malaysia, incorrigible and unregenerate forces mass easily to stymie reformists.
The country does not need a reset so much as a restoration of salience of the Merdeka Proclamation and Federal Constitution of 1957, both of which were subsumed into the Malaysia Agreement 1963.
Those documents were sound, balancing grants of authority with chastening mechanisms.
Over the years, several of the chastening mechanisms were removed and replaced, particularly during the 22-year period of Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s first premiership.
We have to restore those mechanisms and combine that with the adoption of a needs-based rather than race-based approach to poverty eradication.
Restoration, not a reset, is what Malaysia needs.
By Terence Netto / freemalaysiatoday
The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of AsiaWE Review.
