A NEW vista is opening up for Malaysia, one that takes off from the platform of a well-earned high-income economy, but still aspiring to be a mover and a shaker; a world leader. In announcing the new 30-year transformation plan, the 2050 National Transformation (TN50), the 2017 Budget lays the foundation for 2050, when the generation born today will inherit a country where they stand shoulder to shoulder with the world’s best. The catch-up game no longer the rationale for development, the young adults 30 years hence will be Malaysians of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where science is in the ascendant, but minus Huxley’s irony. For some, this is utopia, given where the country is today, but when viewed from the perspective of how much the New Economic Policy of 50 years ago has achieved for the country, TN50 can deliver its promise.
The 2017 Budget has placed emphasis on several platforms intended to engineer a lift-off that should not limit the country to where it is already at, the low end of scientific discovery. Policymakers cannot think of information and communications technology as a frontier. Anyone still perceiving it as a challenge is caught in a time warp. By the next decade, children must interact with computers in schools as a matter of course. Textbooks and exercise books must be made obsolete sooner rather than later. That the 2017 Budget has allocations to upgrade science laboratories in schools is a starter. It, too, is pumping several hundred million into research universities. More is being promised towards enhancing Internet connectivity, a very important factor given that Malaysia has one of the slowest speeds in the region. This basic infrastructure is yet to be in place and must happen by 2020 if the country is to be fully developed.
That inputs from the young is part of the initial thrust of TN50 is hopeful for they, more than the rest of the population, will be technology savvy, but the emphasis on application of knowledge cannot be pushed to the extent that minds will not embrace new knowledge frontiers. Universities still grappling with creating entrepreneurs sound terribly anachronistic when the likes of Elon Musk is testing the latest generation of rockets into space, already leaving behind electric, driverless cars to take care of itself. If the mindset of those in charge are still revolving around the advances of the turn of the century, then TN50 will again be playing the catch-up game.
For this latest initiative to work, there must be critical mass. This should be the immediate objective; young, brilliant minds spending time in science, technology and invention camps. Innovation is not enough if Malaysia is not to be left in what would amount to the Stone Age when others are colonising Mars. TN50 must establish an effective shortcut and foster the necessary critical mass soonest possible. Otherwise, Malaysia will forever be this parochial nation, bragging of Proton and its multinational corporations, symbols of a glorious past and a lost future.