Let us import Dr Mahathir!

KUALA LUMPUR – Stunned with envy upon seeing the really world class KL International Airport terminal and the spanking new expressway to the downtown area, my son suggested it is perhaps a good idea to import recently retired Malaysian Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir. With the prospect of six years of Ate Glo or FPJ, I can only agree.

But if that is what we want to do in our utter desperation over the hopelessness of our own political leaders, we have to move fast. The head of a conservative American think tank in Washington was reported to have suggested that Mahathir be harnessed to help establish working communication lines between America and the Muslim world. It seems that the 77-year-old leader will have a lot of options to keep busy in retirement.

The transformation of Malaysia is all the more spectacular for those of us who saw what Malaysia was in the late 60’s. I was part of a student goodwill delegation from UP that was led by Jerry Barican in 1969. We spent 10 days in Malaysia, traveling all the way up to Penang. That was the time when Malaysia was beset by racial divisiveness and violence.

Sometime in the early 80’s, I was part of a government delegation attending a meeting of Energy officials in this city. About 1994, I delivered a paper in an international conference on cross border communications here too in KL. Finally, five years or so ago, I was part of a group of journalists invited by the Malaysian government to tour the country as part of an Asean journalist exchange program.

Yet, I now feel like I am visiting a totally new KL for the first time. My family and I have been going around the city in their efficient LRT and monorail system. We also rode the super fast and comfortable train that took us to the new capital city of Putrajaya, a few kilometers from the impressive new Kuala Lumpur International Airport.

We also took a ride up to Genting Highland, a cool place to relax except that it had been converted into a noisy and gaudy carnival town. The beauty of Genting is its proximity to KL – just an hour away. Again, the expressway to Genting can only elicit ohhs and ahhs from Pinoys who are used to suffering our absolutely inadequate infrastructure.

I tell you folks, when I first visited this city in 1969, I wouldn’t trade Manila for Kuala Lumpur. I felt proud to be Pinoy and felt sorry for the Malaysians. Today, saying we were left behind does not even begin to capture the feeling of envy in my heart, in any Pinoy’s heart. While Singapore has done a similar miracle, the miracle of Mahathir is to me, more significant because he showed that Malays, if they put their minds to it, could do it as well.

It is for this reason that I think Dr. Mahathir would be a more practical and appropriate teacher for us than Lee Kuan Yew. Dr. Mahathir had to work with Malays who didn’t have the advantage of the Confucian work ethic of the Chinese. In fact, in his controversial book The Malay Dilemma, Dr. Mahathir himself portrayed Malays as downtrodden but too apathetic and fatalistic to do much about it. Doesn’t that sound Filipino too? It was a stereotype Mahathir was determined to break. And he did!

In another of his work, Malays Forget Easily, Dr. Mahathir speaks his mind, imploring the Malays to overcome their weaknesses, defy stereotyping and never ever forget the history of their struggle. In one of his bluntest wake-up calls to the Malays, Dr. Mahathir insists that the Malay mindset must change to enable them to face up to the tough challenges ahead. The Malay people, he said, must make an effort to be hardworking, strive hard to seek knowledge and other essential skills, and to hold on to good values in their conduct.

And so the physician from the small northern state of Kedah spearheaded Malaysia’s transformation from a tin- and rubber-producing backwater into one of Southeast Asia’s wealthiest countries. It now exports shiploads of computers and other manufactured goods. It is geared to successfully meet the challenge of globalization. We, on the other hand, merely whine, as if we can reject the global trend.

It wasn’t easy for Mahathir. He had to deal with problems similar to ours such as "cultural damage". Malaysia’s politicians were also pretty rotten and the ruling party was patronage stricken. Money politics also drove the Malaysian trapos as is our experience in our country. What makes it all amazing is how Mahathir managed to keep the peace among Malaysia’s delicately balanced racial mix while building a modern, secular society with strong Islamic influence.

I "people watched" at several shopping malls here (malls that are so big and so busy they would bring tears to Chinoy taipan Henry Sy’s eyes), and observed teen-age girls wearing designer jeans and Muslim head scarves totally at ease in this delicately blended secular Muslim society. I also noticed what looks to me like a strong middle class driven consumer society powering their economy. What I didn’t see was a single squatter shanty or beggars in the streets.

What pains me as I look out of my Shangri-La hotel room, is the knowledge we were way ahead of Malaysia in terms of development not too long ago. I have seen Malaysia’s transformation with my own eyes in five visits here over a period of 30 years.

Okay, so Dr. Mahathir’s development record has come with an autocratic style. But we had 20 years of autocratic rule too under Marcos and got nothing for all the suffering and loss of freedom but a large foreign debt and a string of unresolved hidden wealth cases.

I can’t help bitterly blaming Marcos for our condition. If the Marcoses were not as greedy as they turned out to be, we would have long been the miracle that Malaysia is today. I imagine Dr. Mahathir has his own mistakes, the controversial and very expensive Bakun dam for instance. And cronyism under his regime had often been criticized. But by and large, he provided inspiring leadership and delivered the infrastructure that catapulted Malaysia into what it is today.

Mr. Mahathir has pursued a grand vision to make Malaysia a fully developed country by 2020 and I assure you that country is well on its way to get there sooner. He adopted hands-on economic management as he vigorously wooed foreign investment during the Asian boom years of the 1980s and early 1990s. He inspired investor confidence, despite his abrasive attitude towards Western political and business personalities and practices. In contrast, despite our nauseating sycophancy to the West, investor confidence remains elusive for us.

Alas, our tragedy today is, none of the candidates who aspire to lead us has the spunk of Mahathir to dream big and has the ability to deliver. Roco, maybe, but he is thus far, not too inspiring. Also, none of them has shared with us their vision of what we are to be. This is why I think my son’s idea of signing up Dr. Mahathir makes a lot of sense.

Maybe we can require all our presidential candidates to participate in a seminar conducted by Dr. Mahathir on what it took to lead a country like Malaysia out of the vicious clasp of poverty and helplessness. But what is the Filipino Dilemma? Can we surmount our psychological barriers to progress? Why are we so good when we work abroad but couldn’t get our own country in order?

We should send our leaders to visit Malaysia just so they will see how much they have shortchanged the Filipino people all these years. They should see Malaysia to realize once and for all that it can be done.

Good Example

When I left for KL the day after Christmas, Fernando Zobel de Ayala was slightly ahead of me at the NAIA immigration line. With him were his wife, three daughters and two yayas. It was a pretty long line that snaked around because Immigration was testing a new computer system. Buboy Virata, one of those high flying finance types who is also behind the Renong expressway in Cavite, saw Fernando and offered to save him the trouble of lining up. Fernando declined.

Buboy, probably uneasy that he is getting special treatment while Fernando is still in the long line, came back with an immigration officer and again offered to give Fernando special treatment. Once more Fernando, who still didn’t see me lined up a few persons behind him, declined. It was after his second refusal that I walked up to him and told him I was impressed he resisted the temptation. He said nothing as if there was nothing extraordinary in his behavior. We were on that line for close to 45 minutes.

There was a surrealistic feel to the scene. Fernando Zobel de Ayala, whose family controls the country’s financial district, was insisting that he be treated like the ordinary Filipino overseas workers standing in line with him. On the other hand, a new rich wannabe in comparison to an Ayala, is taking special treatment as his birthright.

I told my son, who is here on vacation from business grad school, that we just saw two faces of our local elite – one who showed good breeding, always ready to set the right example. The other expects special treatment. This is typical of that part of our local elite that cannot be trusted to use power and privilege for the greater common good because they are unable and unwilling to identify with the masa or consider them their equals in our democratic society.

Fernando Zobel de Ayala certainly made my day!

Happy New Year!

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]