MALAYSIA is rich in natural resources, but governance, a critical element in realising the wealth, has been an issue for sometime now. Look at our neighbours north, south, east and west, all except civil strife-ridden Myanmar are ahead in the wealth table, however such affluence is measured.
We can't be proud of beating a failed state, can we? It is for this reason the 5-month-old unity government led by Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim is harping on governance every chance it gets.
We hope his cabinet is behind him on this. More critically, the entire civil service must be a paragon of good governance. But Anwar and his administration have hills — make that mountains — to climb to stop Malaysia's resource blessings from becoming a curse.
On Wednesday, EMIR Research, a strategy think tank, revealed how our Creator's blessings showered on Malaysia can and often do turn into a curse in the hands of wrong leaders. This Leader's unmistakable message yesterday, like that of EMIR Research's shocking revelation, was the same: leadership has turned most of our blessings into a curse.
Lest we be misunderstood, we are not blaming every leader we have had. That would be an unjust generalisation. And like all generalisations, this would fault the faultless. Our aim is not that. Be that as it may, the climb up the mountain of good governance may seem herculean, but climb we must.
Surely there must have been something good we have done in the past. Yes, there were but for some inexplicable reason the government of the day started and ended and started them again. Consider one example.
Malaysia My Second Home (MM2H) was a laudable programme that attracted high-income individuals to the country. Close to 50,000 people have come to Malaysia under the MM2H umbrella since it was started in 2002. There are two ways of measuring MM2H participants' contribution to Malaysia's economy.
One is individual consumption, which if media reports are right, added RM12 billion to the economy up to 2019. Not much as a standalone number if measured against Malaysia's gross domestic product. This brings us to the second way MM2H boosts the economy: foreign fund flow.
Again media reports say this amounted to RM41 billion, not a small number for 17 years. But the government has made it unattractive by putting it on a one-year hiatus and then introducing drastic changes. Now they are heading to Thailand, which has seen it wise to introduce more hospitable terms. True, not everything was right with MM2H.
That is because we didn't think deeply enough about two things. Firstly, about what we want from MM2H. Secondly, about how to govern MM2H. For these two reasons, Malaysia discovered in 2021 that of the 50,000 MM2H participants, 7,000 were not residing in the country. Good governance doesn't mean doing something after this or that goes wrong. It means doing the best to not let something go wrong.
Often we think of governance to mean sticking to the rules. This is only halfway there. Governance also means getting the rules right. MM2H is an example of how a good idea can go wrong, if either or both aren't right. Sadly, MM2H is just an example.