APART from our multiracial and multicultural diversity, what is Malaysia’s unique selling point, as they put it in marketing parlance?
I believe it is our humming economy, chugging along nicely all these years since Merdeka, 60 years ago. Lest we take it all for granted, which we are wont to,
all this was not necessarily
pre-ordained.
This writer was in Ghana in West Africa earlier in the new century. The country attained independence also in 1957 and was then the toast of the entire African continent with all its promise and potentials — gold deposits underground, lush tropical rainforests and an abundance of tillable land and a long coastline. Yet, Accra, the capital, in the early 2000s, looked like a city where time stood still.
So, what is the secret with the Malaysian economy that has put the country and Malaysians in such good stead?
International Trade and Industry Minister Datuk Seri Mustapa Mohamed summed it up well this week: “Malaysia continues to be pragmatic in its engagement with the rest of the world. We will continue to support the multilateral system and open regionalism.”
Sixty years after Merdeka, the country, as Mustapa revealed, is now a net exporter of capital, with our direct investments abroad at the end of the second quarter of this year at RM574 billion against foreign direct investments of RM557 billion.
But, there is more. Malaysia and its economic managers and political leaders did not just rest on the laurels of the initial good fortune we had. Instead, we diversified into new areas and ventures. Again, as Mustapa stressed: “This point needs to be constantly highlighted as we have been one of the most successful countries in the world in transforming the socio-economic landscape of Malaysia in the last 60 years.”
We faltered along the way, of course. Probably, the worst happened in 1969 when some Malay-sians turned against each other and some blood was spilled. For a moment, it did look like the end of the world for us as our leaders, shell-shocked, temporarily suspended our young democracy.
Crises are often wasted as those caught in them failed to learn lessons or chose to learn the wrong lessons. As luck would have it, we did not waste the crisis of 1969. It was a key turning point in our Merdeka journey. A new prime minister, Tun Abdul Razak Hussein, took over as Bapa Malaysia Tunku Abdul Rahman made way. The New Economic Policy (NEP) was formulated.
Many newly-emerging countries made the fatal mistake of wholesale nationalisation of entire economies at the first hint of economic and political troubles. Malaysia knew that economic restructuring in the wake of the riots of 1969 was imperative to bring about a more just and equitable society overall.
But, our leaders then fully understood the perils of forcibly carving up the economic pie and leading the nation in a downward spiral to shared penury instead of shared prosperity.
So, instead of carving up the existing economic cake, the NEP was predicated on a crucial proviso: that economic restructuring will happen only from an ever-expanding economy so all Malay-sians will benefit with a piece of a steadily growing pie.
A more enlightened policy of economic redistribution to ensure ever-growing numbers of Malaysians gain a stake in the national economy will be hard to find anywhere else.
Today, we stand almost peerless in economic standing and performance among the newly-emerging countries that gained their independence about the same time we did. Minus the city-states of Singapore and Hong Kong, and the East Asian miracle economies collectively called the Asian tigers, our nation stands virtually alone today on the cusp of reaching high-income status.
We have much work left to do to reach such a hallowed status, to be sure. Far too many Malaysians still struggle to make ends meet and an uncomfortably sizable minority — particularly in Sabah and Sarawak — still has not risen above the level of subsistence living.
All Malaysians, during this landmark Merdeka year, must seek to rededicate themselves to work doubly hard and remain steadfast and undistracted from the vital task still ahead of us to reach towards and finally attain the sustainable high-income status.
We must not lapse into the quagmire of populist politics that even some of the most developed economies today are finding themselves susceptible to. For us, there is no turning back from an open economy that strives to compete with the top-ranked global economies.
The writer views developments in the nation, the region and the wider world from his vantage point in Kuching, Sarawak.