Malaysia

IF WISHES WERE HORSES, PIGS WOULD FLY

Only in our dreams are we free; the rest of the time we need wages. –  English novelist Terry Pratchett

There is never enough time, unless you’re serving it. – Publisher Malcolm Forbes

The former Prime Minister who yearned to be called Bossku, but was Fearless, thought serving a prison sentence was no disgrace but was confoundedly inconvenient.

Fearless hadn’t served two years yet but had spent more time in court than Tommy Thomas. For one thing, he’d tried mightily to overturn his 12-year sentence but to no avail. For another, he still faced a slew of other charges, relating to more looting, for which he had to attend court.  

You don’t get to be what the foreign media calls the “world’s biggest kleptocrat” without consequences.

Despite that, the man seemed bent on ducking prison time. His lawyers are now insisting he be allowed to serve out his time at home. That’s what “house arrest” means.  

Why not, they argued craftily. It would solve prison over-crowding pretty much immediately. 

The rub, of course, is it makes a mockery of the criminal justice system and legitimises corruption. It’s not for nothing society invents phrases such as “crime does not pay.” 

Fearless and his chubby co-conspirator Felonious aka Jho Low stand accused of stealing over RM40 billion from the state’s coffers at a time when the former was the Prime Minister. Felonious is still at large – both literally and metaphorically – but is believed to be living off his ill-gotten gains in China. The country denies it, of course, but it would, wouldn’t it?   

It follows that what Fearless is requesting from the courts is permission to serve out the rest of his sentence in the comfort of his well-appointed house with its lush garden, pristine bathrooms and air-conditioned bedrooms. Add to that a well-stocked larder, a  resident chef, countless help, and a couple of discreet bodyguards and you get a whiff of Felonious’ current lifestyle in A Country That Denies His Existence. 

This is the conundrum the criminal is currently calling on the courts to consider. 

To call it unprecedented is to state the obvious. No Malaysian premier has ever been jailed before either but as Bangkok or Islamabad will testify, it’s been known to happen. 

There is, of course, the monumental problem of the non-existence of such a provision. Simply put, there is no such thing as “house arrest” in the Malaysian penal code and prison wardens do not operate from houses, at least not since 1957. Nor is it anywhere in the Federal Constitution or in the Pardons’ Act.  

Moreover, there are those remaining charges against Fearless. These aren’t minor either:  they address the alleged kleptocracy head on. 

What happens if those charges stick? 

Watching from the safety of his hideout, Felonious’ tubby ticker bled for his erstwhile comrade-in-harm. The rotund robber shuddered at the thought of the fare Fearless might be receiving in prison.

With a guilty pang, he realised his own larder bulged with nothing but the best, the finest Italian hams, the choicest Dutch cheeses, the sweetest Persian figs;  the stuff   gourmands drool over in dreams. 

He washed away a lingering residue of guilt with another goblet of ice-cold Krug and felt it could have been worse.  

It could have been him. 

ENDS

EASIER SAID THAN DONE

I couldn’t believe my eyes. 

I rarely read the papers as it’s depressing.  But on occasion – this column, for instance – I must trawl for ideas, and you know what they say about beggars. 

And there it was. An item in Star Online, about the government contemplating an Act of Parliament to curb rent seeking. 

Imagine that! 

Do Malaysian business people know what rent seeking is? That’s like asking if the Ayatollah’s Muslim? They may not know its meaning, neither did they invent it, but they know the practice. In fact, they’ve taken it to Everest-like heights. Rent seeking is the practice of manipulating public policy or economic conditions as a strategy for increasing profits. 

Unfortunately, a pivotal public policy in Malaysia facilitates, nay, encourages such behaviour. 

Since 1971, the New Economic Policy has sought to uplift the country’s poorer Bumiputeras (indigenes and largely Malays) into economic parity with their richer countrymen. 

Where the Malay corporate and industrial community’s concerned, it’s taken various forms including quotas, licenses, permits, contracts, concessions, even outright grants. There isn’t any estimate, but many billions of taxpayer dollars would have been spent by now.   

They’ve been used to reshape industry. Take autos. In the 70s, it was dominated by the Chinese. The government decreed that approved permits (APs) would have to be obtained to import and sell cars in the country.

It created an effective monopoly. Cars became more expensive and the favoured few became very rich. 

One, so much so that he went into helicopters in a big way. At least, it demonstrated his entrepreneurial flair. 

The rest remain dependent on patronage and get outraged when their entitlement is threatened. 

Standout example: they weren’t happy campers when Tesla was recently allowed to import and sell its own cars without jumping through hoops – like having to go through an AP dealer, or Tesla having to sell some of its local equity to a Malay partner. 

The hoops, in the context of state protection from competition, are everything. 

Meanwhile, there are other items – from sugar and onions to flour and steel products – that require import licenses. It creates more “rents” – only selected businessmen need apply – and inflates prices.  

Under Dr Mahathir’s premiership, new rents were created and not necessarily for Bumiputeras.  At one point, the latest scheme for instant wealth creation were the licensing of independent power producers. 

IPPs bought subsidised gas from Petronas and, if its former chairman is to be believed, the national utility was “forced” to buy its output. 

Its obvious drawback –  whopping costs to the state-owned utility – was all but ignored in the flush of new wealth creation and an excited stock market.

As a former reporter, I used to think that some people were there just to dream up new RS schemes that would be NEP-compliant. The trick was to have a powerful, and sympathetic, ear in government.  

It was thus that I got a tip-off in 2003 that cigarette and beer firms would be forced to affix security labels on their products to “deter smuggling”.  

It wasn’t surprising. Cigarettes and beer are heavily taxed ergo smuggling is rampant. It still is. 

The firms are easy targets as they are foreign-owned and their products, generally frowned upon. Full disclosure: I like beer.

The tipoff was accurate.  I called the company, and they came back with the old “it’s the Swiss technology” chestnut.

A search revealed that the firm’s chairman was a brother of a (then) senior Umno minister. Smoking gun. We ran with the story in the Asian WSJ the next day and I waited expectantly. 

It went over with all the thrill of a wet sponge. Talk of vanishing into a vacuum! No outrage, no heated denials. Boredom, it seemed, was the order of the day.  

It was just another day in Paradise.  

ENDS 

KILLJOYS OF MALAYSIA

He made us all one true religion, Edith, which he named after his son, Christian – or Christ, for short.  – Archie Bunker, in the TV sitcom All In The Family  

The other day we met up with Y, one of my wife’s friends, who’d flown over from Kay-El with one aim: to see Coldplay perform live.

He’d booked a hotel room and, since he was in Singapore with his wife, he might as well stay a few days. The concert tickets were S$200 (RM694) each so what the hell?  

“We haven’t been here for ages anyway,” he told us cheerfully.

The British band had agreed to play six January concerts in the city-state: all in the same venue, a rare concession that underscored the island’s marketing skill.  It made good business sense. All the dates were booked solid, and it drew fans from as far away as New Zealand. 

That’s the way to do it. 

It was the Arabs who came up with the saying: “the dogs may bark but the caravan moves on.” This commonsensical notion was largely true for Malaysia in its first 50 years or so but not so much now. Every time any barking starts, the country staggers, stops or even reverses course altogether.    

The Islamic Party of Malaysia, or Pas, is largely responsible for this. It, quite seriously, sees itself as the moral watchdog of the country and its outraged yelps against concerts – or anything remotely entertaining for that matter– is costing the country dear: the number of Malaysians like Y who went south to hear Coldplay is anyone’s guess.

Where concerts are concerned, Pas has developed a Pavlovian response: object, object and then, still object. 

Why? 

Why not?  would be the correct response in The World According to Pas. 

Take the upcoming Ed Sheeran concert in Kuala Lumpur. The baby-faced English singer-songwriter is scheduled to perform here on February 24.

It’s too near Ramadan, Pas winged. Not really: the start of the fasting month is almost 2 weeks from the date. 

Eureka, cried the Clerics’ Council of Pas – its highest policy making body – in the triumphant, and Ancient Greek, tones of a Holmes getting his man. 

Apparently, the shady Sheeran was a sinister subversive who surreptitiously supported scoundrelly syndicates like the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community. 

Who would’ve thought? 

Harumph, said Khairy Jamaluddin in the dismissive manner of a Grandmaster about to checkmate a lesser mortal. 

A former Health Minister, Mr Khairy revealed that Pas had never “aggressively” pushed for concert bans when it was in government between March 2020 and November 2023. He went on to say that when push came to shove, the matter was raised only once and that, “timidly” too, as a question during a Cabinet meeting. 

In short, zilch, zip and nada. 

Now, who would’ve thought? 

The party’s spiritual adviser confirmed Mr Khairy’s opinion in a backhanded sort of way. He said as it was in government then, the party had more “pressing” matters and issues that “needed our immediate attention.”   

He did not reveal what was so “pressing” that it needed the party’s “immediate” attention. Indeed, any Malaysian worth his salt would be hard pressed to remember a single policy, issue, or idea, that Pas articulated, floated, or espoused during its two-odd years in power. 

It was zip, zilch and nada all over again. 

ENDS

WHO RATES OUR TEACHERS?

There is actually a law  governing academic research. It’s like a Murphy’s Law for academics and it’s called Hanggi’s Law. 

Clearly, the good Hanggi had time on his hands because his axion states “the more trivial your research, the more people will read it and agree.”  

Close but no cigar. 

An academic paper on Malay maritime history – trivial, not to mention staggeringly boring by any yardstick – by two University Putra Malaysia (UPM) researchers has not met with agreement. 

Instead, it’s being questioned with its two researchers accused of misrepresenting facts about Malay maritime history.

The allegations go to the heart of intellectual integrity in some Malaysian universities and echo repeated accusations that the  history in Malaysian textbooks is often rewritten to suit the Malay political narrative.  

Among other things, the paper seemed to suggest that the ships used by Malay sailors during the Malacca sultanate were comparable to their counterparts from China or Portugal.  

Serge Jardin, a French historian who’s co-authored several books on Malaccan history, criticised the duo for misrepresentation. He called it “a shame,” asking darkly:  “How low can academics go?” 

Among the points he noted in a Facebook post, Jardin alleged that an image used in the UPM paper to show a model of a Malay Jong (a type of sailing ship originating from Java, Indonesia) was, in fact, a Foochow Pole Junk (a type of cargo vessel) from China.

If plagiarism is a mortal sin in academe, misrepresentation isn’t far behind. But instead of saying it would “investigate and get back,” the university defended the duo.  

UPM said the article complied with its policy of being peer-reviewed but added blandly that social science and humanities studies were often “open to interpretation.”

In response, the French historian called the university’s defence “a joke.” He wasn’t laughing though.

According to the NST, Monsieur Jardin challenged the expertise of those who conducted the blind peer review for the duo’s paper, saying UPM’s defence could be easily disproved. 

“How is it possible for an expert not to see the difference between a Chinese junk and a Malay jong?” he asked, adding, “Have you ever seen a Malay boat with a pair of eyes at its bow? That belongs to the Chinese culture.” 

There were more questions. 

“How can a maritime expert confirm the galley (ghali) was used in Melaka, in the Sultanate of Melaka fleet, before the arrival of the Portuguese and the Ottomans in Southeast Asia? There is no historical source to sustain that affirmation.”

But the Frenchman’s most damaging allegation was aimed at the duo’s choice of publication.

Jardin questioned the journal, saying it was a “pay to publish” journal and that its publisher, Human Resource Management Academic Research Society, was listed as “predatory” in Beall’s List.

Beall’s List, originally created by University of Colorado librarian and researcher Jeffrey Beall, is a widely used and referenced list that identifies potential predatory publishers and journals.

“UKM (Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia) has even put up a list of predatory publishers/journals, which can be found on its website,” said Jardin, adding that the journal – used by the duo – appears on the list.

“‘It is not recognised by UKM but is good enough for UPM?” he questioned. 

He isn’t the researchers’ only critic. James Chin the Head Of Asian Studies at the University of Tasmania dubbed the research “bunkum.” 

The debate is unlikely to die down. But higher education in the country needs to be reviewed. There are questions about our tertiary education. Too many PhDs, unemployed graduates… The hits just keep on coming.  

And there is, of course, a question about the quality of faculty, its research.  

Or do we need foreigners to check?

ENDS

EDUCATING MALAYSIA

You know there’s a problem with the education system when you realise that out of the 3R’s, only one begins with an ‘R’ – TV personality Dennis Miller

I used to be pretty good at math in high school although I remember asking Mr Chan Lok Chin, our often-testy additional mathematics teacher, about the utility of calculus. 

Actually, my precise question was: “Why are we learning this, Sir?” His retort was equally precise: “Because I said so.” 

And so I did and, because he was an excellent teacher, I actually enjoyed being able to derive logical solutions out of seeming gobbledygook.  I went on to join the Selangor Club where, not unreasonably, we were all taught never to drink and derive.

But my long-ago question about its utility remains valid. I suspect the American writer and humorist, Fran Lebowitz, reached the same, gloomy conclusion about algebra. “Stand firm in your refusal to remain conscious during algebra; in real life, I assure you there is no such thing as algebra.” 

Education is, I suppose, what remains when you subtract what you’ve forgotten from what you’ve learned. That residual knowledge, built up by reading and experiential living, should equip us sufficiently to enable us, for example, to teach our kids basic math or balance our cheque-books.  It opens the door to opportunity and a way forward, to allow a person to become the best he or she can be. 

That’s the theory but it presupposes an education system that has reasonably good teachers teaching the relevant subject matter in reasonably good environments. The education that my classmates and I received at the hands of people like Mr Chan all those years ago, for example. 

There’s the rub. It’s not clear if it’s happening, if new generations of better educated Malaysians are being constantly, and consistently, produced. 

Going by our latest PISA scores, it’s not. The Programme for Intermediate Student Assessment, or PISA, is a global  evaluation of 15-year-olds that’s standardised so that comparisons can reasonably be made. 

PISA assesses not only whether students can reproduce knowledge, but whether they can extrapolate from what they have learnt and apply their knowledge in new situations. 

Alarm bells should ring: we have declined steadily since the tests began in 2000.  In the latest (2022) PISA rankings, the country dropped on all three metrics — sciences, math and reading literacy.

The latest PISA scores show that Malaysian 15-year-olds scored 409 in math (down from 440 previously), 416 in science (down from 438 in 2018). In reading, Malaysians scored 388, down from 415.

Only 1.2% of the students were excellent at math, and only 0.5% were good at science. Less than half, just 42%, were good at reading.

Needless to say, Singapore topped all three metrics. In the region, Cambodia, Brunei, Singapore and the Philippines all improved their rankings from previously. Only Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia saw their ranking decline with ours truly being the worst, with a 32-point drop. Pressed for an explanation, the Director-General of Education craftily equivocated, “The situation,” harrumphed the worthy, “wasn’t unique to Malaysia.” 

The solutions aren’t rocket science either. There is a lack of qualified teachers. Indeed, there is a serious lack of math, science and English teachers. 

It can’t be for the lack of money.  Education received the lion’s share of the 2023 budget: almost 20%, or RM75 billion out of RM390 billion, all told.  

It’s nonsensical. There is a preference to build new schools instead of maintaining and repairing old ones. There is a proliferation of religious and rewritten history texts without good reason. Dr Mahathir has repeatedly  alluded to the former but he did nothing about it. 

Anwar Ibrahim has talked ceaselessly about reform. He should begin with the Pisa scores and insist on solutions.  

And he should  start now.

ENDS

NO SEX PLEASE, WE’RE MALAYSIAN 

Nothing risqué, nothing gained. – US theatre critic, Alexander Woollcott

Sex without love is an empty experience but as empty experiences go, it’s one of the best. – Woody Allen 

Queen Victoria, who was the UK’s monarch when Rudyard Kipling was warbling about the sun “never setting” on the British Empire, wasn’t particularly impressed by a baby’s looks: “An ugly baby is a very nasty object – and the prettiest is frightful.”

She should talk: the reason, for her presumably plain offspring, usually stared back at her every morning. Still, it’s a strange sentiment from a person who had nine children over 17 years. 

Clearly, she wasn’t averse to the practice but deplored its outcome. 

A person like Victoria, however, might have been welcomed in present-day Singapore by no less than a brass band. Going by its outcomes, Singaporeans aren’t particularly interested in multiplying. 

It’s true. At 1.3 births per woman, the wealthy city-state has the fifth lowest fertility rate in the world.

Going forward it leads to an aging population and an increasing dependence on imported foreign labour. In cases like Japan where the problem has been protracted and, unlike Singapore, immigration to replace the population isn’t allowed, primary schools are being closed for want of enrolment. Japan has a fertility rate of 1.34 babies per woman. 

Malaysia is, slowly but surely, heading there.   According to the news-portal FMT, the fertility rate in 2023 reached its lowest in five decades, with 1.6 children for every woman compared to 1.7 babies per woman in 2022. Statistically speaking, the replacement rate of any population is 2.1 children for every family. 

Singapore has tried various incentives to encourage more births including tax incentives and outright cash handouts: citizen receive SGD10, 000 for every new child. They have all failed, a lesson Japan could have shared and Dr Mahathir should have noted vis-à-vis his hare-brained idea, in the 1980s, of a 70-million population policy for the country.

You can’t foist these sort of policies on a populace. An inbuilt, “quality of life” barometer is inherent in the human experience and rising education and affluence has all but entrenched the notion of small families.

Man has proved himself admirable in that sense. At one time, it was thought  that humanity would ultimately starve  because populations grew geometrically while the food supply expanded arithmetically, The notion  didn’t take into account human ingenuity and its discovery of technology.  

What remains, however, is a dreadful irony. There is starvation is some parts of Africa while obesity and diabetes are becoming serious problems in Malaysia. 

But the demographic trend is here to stay. Indeed, a 2022 Pew Research Centre study using US data has indicated, for the first time in human history, that the world’s population will stop growing by the end of this century. 

For Malaysia it appears recreation has supplanted procreation and we’ve come full circle as it were. It isn’t such a bad thing and I suppose we should consider ourselves blessed: it is a problem of plenty and numerical proof that we are steadily developing and getting more affluent.

That is not to say that Malaysians, or Singaporeans for that matter, aren’t engaging in sex any more. Like Victoria, one suspects they aren’t doing it any less either.  

ENDS

MUSINGS ON MALAYSIA 

“A bunch of money grubbing,’ greenhouse gassing, seal clubbing, oil drilling, Bible thumping, missile firing, right to life-ing, lethal injecting   hypocrites, whose idea of a good time is strapping a dead panda to a pick-up truck and running through a gay parade. – Comedian Richard Jeni, on the right-wing in the US. 

The many arguments against democracy can seriously unnerve you. 

Listen to Winston Churchill. “The best argument against democracy,” argued the great man, “is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”  The actor Frank Dane was even more pessimistic – “Get the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything.” 

It’s enough to drive a man to drink. 

But as we approach Malaysia’s 60th birthday, we can take some heart in the fact that we haven’t quite reached the stage of missile-firing hypocrisy. 

Yet, we are a fractured nation, split between the political will and a religious won’t, a mutually suspicious, rural-urban chasm, and an East-West divide that could get implacable if not addressed. Presiding over this uneasy mix is a person determined to keep an unlikely coalition together by all manner of means.

It’s enough to give dirty politics a bad name.

And yet Premier Anwar Ibrahim has a lot going for him. Malaysia’s fundamental growth story is still intact, its resilient export-led expansion still sustained. 

Our education system can’t be all that bad because we continue to throw up entrepreneurs at a good rate. I know this because my wife has, for some years now, been on the EY panel that selects the country’s best. 

There’s a young guy, for example, who’s already the country’s largest vanilla producer and he grows it on small, high yielding, “intelligent” farms. Currently, Madagascar is the world’s largest producer, but it, allegedly, uses child labour, which is a no-no. 

Our boy doesn’t.  Which is why he thinks, that by expanding to East Malaysia, he will eventually secure 10% of world supply.

There is another who uses genetic sequencing to produce hardy and exclusively male prawn fry for sale to farmers: the male of the species is bigger. 

And yet another who fattens fly larvae by feeding them agricultural waste only to grind said fatties into protein for fertiliser and animal feed. On a large scale, it’s enormously sustainable. 

Tony Fernandes once told me that he was summoned to see Lee Kuan Yew the first time he landed in Singapore on Air Asia’s first flight. 

“He wanted to know what made me tick,” said Fernandes. “I replied that I thought it was because I was Malaysian.” 

Apparently, the old man gave him a hard stare, perhaps thinking he was being facetious. 

It may have been the truth. 

I’ve been in Singapore for almost five years, and I can quite unequivocally state Malaysians are far friendlier than their southern counterparts. Our dinner invites are almost entirely from Malaysians living on the island. The only exceptions have been a long-time friend and my niece. 

That is Malaysia’s true strength, the multi-racial, multicultural, experiment that’s so far been sustained by its people: the country of my childhood, the Malaysia captured by Lat.

That’s what we need: more Lats and less Mahathirs. 

ENDS 

OLDER BUT NO WISER

I can’t tell you his age but when he was born, the wonder drugs were leeches – Comedian Milton Berle (paraphrased)

What’s a bigot?

It’s a person who has an obstinate, or unreasonable belief, or prejudice against people on the basis of their membership in a particular group.

By that definition, the grand, old man of Malaysian politics, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, is an unrepentant bigot. 

Except he isn’t grand anymore. He’s just old. At 97, the man remains as great as he never was but he tries to stay relevant: his last birthday cake resembled a Canadian wildfire. 

He’s a selective bigot, however. He dislikes Jews on principle but claims  “good  friends” among them including, of all people,  Henry Kissinger – the one who once ordered no part of Indo-China to remain un-bombed.  

Granted there’s no accounting for taste but the man’s deep seated convictions    about nationalism, Singapore or Malaysia’s non-Malays, remain, at best, jaundiced. 

In the late 70s, for example, he learned that Premier Hussein Onn was planning to move against Harun Idris, chief minister of Selangor and populist politician, for corruption. Dr M, then deputy premier, led a troika of party faithful to plead Harun’s case. 

Their appeal was that Harun was “a nationalist” which to Dr M probably  meant he was a staunch “Malay-first” patriot.

Hussein dismissed them replying “So am I.” Suffice to say that corruption wasn’t a problem during his tenure. 

To Dr M, Singapore was always abhorrent. If Lee Kuan Yew had his way in the 1960s, he has intimated darkly, it would have been a “Malaysian Malaysia,” multiracialism, meritocracy and, quite possibly, Armageddon-as-he-knew-it.  

Never mind that Goh Keng Swee, later Singapore’s finance minister, had  conceded that affirmative action on a grand scale for the Malays had to be implemented to make Malaysia work. 

Never mind that  the experiment that was  Singapore worked so spectacularly, or that Lee Kuan Yew became a global metaphor for an against-all-odds nation builder. Finally,  never mind that Malaysia’s founding fathers always considered affirmative action to have a finite shelf life. 

Not for Dr M. His insistence that affirmative action for the Malays be continued forever, coupled to his longevity in power all but enshrined the policy in stone, never to be questioned on pain of treason. 

And yet, it’s legitimately unleashed a Pandora’s Box of waste, pilferage and corruption. Ironically, it’s  accepted as part of the “price” of development. 

Despite all that, Singapore continues to haunt the old man, primarily  as an object lesson to Malaysia’s Malays, the one about being careful about what you wish for. 

But the island’s hard currency allows its Malay citizens to travel or to stay in Malaysian hotels that many locals can only imagine. And let’s not forget the enduring  ambition of many locals to work in the republic. 

In a reaction directly linked to Anwar Ibrahim’s rise to power, the man remains haunted by  multi-racialism. Last Wednesday, he told reporters that there were attempts to change, or rename,  Tanah Melayu  (Land of the Malays) to a multiracial country presumably,  the much-dreaded “Malaysian Malaysia.”  

Moreover, these people – from “foreign countries,” no less – refused to accept that the Malays were “the founders, locals and builders” of this country. 

The same Dr M once told a group of non-Malays, me included, that Malaysia was a multi-ethnic and multicultural society so everybody had to “tread gently.” But he was premier then and the rules, presumably, were different. Now that everything had changed, he was just being pragmatic and what was wrong with that? 

It reminds me of what he used to say about Anwar. What was it again? 

Ah yes, I remember. 

Something about a leopard not being able to change its spots, wasn’t it? 

ENDS

BE AFRAID, BE VERY AFRAID

When we were seniors in high school in the 1970s, we all aspired to enter the one, real university in the country.

A degree from University Malaya mattered greatly back then because it almost always ensured a reasonably good job. 

The quality of the degree mattered even more.

The politician R Sivarasa, for example, was my batchmate until our penultimate year. Then, he dropped biochemistry for genetics.

To no one’s surprise, he got a First and went on to read law at Oxford by way of the Rhodes’ Scholarship.

In short, obtaining a first-class honours degree in any field back then was an achievement. It conferred its recipient great prestige and the pick of jobs. Needless to say, it was rarer than gold dust. 

Not anymore, it seems.  

I was shocked to read today that 80,000 students had been awarded Firsts from Malaysian universities last year.  

You’d think the faculty would know better: churning out such degrees in such numbers is simply to debase their worth. In economic terms, it’s higher education beset by soaring inflation. 

It was in the 1970s when I first heard of graduate unemployment. At the time, it was in the Philippines where, apparently, there were too many graduates chasing too few jobs. 

I never dreamt that the same thing might happen here. Not in Malaysia, I thought, with its superb education system, where a person with just high school education might go on to become fine writers in English.  

Indeed, my teachers in those days largely had diplomas but they were seriouslygood and cultivated in us a love of reading that’s helped enormously. 

Here’s a question: Why, ceteris paribus (all things being equal), are graduates from Sunway University more employable, than graduates from public universities? 

It’s a fact that makes government officials uncomfortable. But it’s a question the Education Ministry would be well advised to ponder. 

How did we come to this?

There is an adage that goes like this: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Our education system was never broken, yet our government, starting in the mid-1970s and, prodded by Malay nationalists who should have known better, thought it needed fixing.

Almost 50 years later, the results are clear, most demonstrably in the difference between the education systems of Singapore and Malaysia.   

Both began with similar British-designed structures. One changed while the other did not. 

The outcomes are palpable. Singapore has world class education. We don’t. 

Even worse is our access. Once open to all races at relatively cheap entry levels, a good education in Malaysia is almost exclusively a preserve for the well-heeled. 

Unless you count education in Chinese schools which, for one thing, is ironic. For another, it’s limited: it’s difficult to get approval for new independent Chinese schools. 

With his impregnable majority, Dr Mahathir should have tackled this a long time ago. It’s different now: with the fragile coalitions we have, it will take a miracle to unravel the mess that is our education. 

Like it or not, we will continue to have graduates working as Grab riders, and waiters, or rubbish collectors in Singapore.   

Imagine their dashed expectations. Imagine their despair and hopelessness.

Now imagine their rage. 

ENDS

THE RETURN OF THE COMEBACK KID

I intend to open up this country to democracy, and anyone who is against that, I will jail – Joao Baptista de Oliveira, 20th Century Brazilian politician 

Thankfully, Malaysia isn’t like that anymore. 

In what can only be described as retributive karma of the dramatic kind, Anwar Ibrahim was sworn in as Malaysia 10th premier just as his long-time nemesis Dr Mahathir Mohamad began contemplating a future of political obscurity. 

It’s about time. Dr Mahathir is old enough to know better, yet he conspired to delay Anwar’s ascension to the top for the longest time. His hubris knew no bounds either: right up to the night of November 19, he actually thought he was Malaysia’s best bet for the premiership. 

Alas, how the mighty have fallen. 

The island of Langkawi in Malaysia’s northeast was single-handedly promoted and developed by the physician throughout his 22-year leadership. For all that, its people so rejected him that he lost his deposit. In political terms, that’s about as humiliating as it gets.  

Indeed, his entire party – including a son, Mukhriz – was annihilated.  

Anwar’s triumph underscores his never-say-die, singe-minded perseverance in the face of unrelenting adversity. Sacked in 1988 for “moral misconduct” by Dr M, he was immediately clapped behind bars without bail for seven years until the federal court finally acquitted him of abuse of power and sodomy.  

He was jailed once again in 2013 for sodomy and spent another five years behind bars until he was finally pardoned in 2018.

In contrast, ex-premier Najib Razak spent five years free on bail and was accorded every privilege of a former premier despite being accused of the greatest theft in global history.

The markets endorsed Anwar’s appointment jubilantly with the stock, forex and bond markets all rallying to highs not seen for almost two years. The broader index of the Kuala Lumpur stock exchange, for example, leapt almost 4%. 

In contrast, when it appeared, on Wednesday, that a government dominated by the Islamic Party of Malaysia, appeared likely to gain power, all three markets retreated in fright.

Anwar will inherit a government beset with formidable challenges, On the one hand, the country faces serious economic challenges ranging from huge domestic debt and declining investor confidence to rising inflation amid a persistently weak currency.

On another level, the question of education, specifically the type of education being force fed to many children is assuming sinister proportions. 

After Anwar’s victory, news surfaced of Malay children expressing fear that the Democratic Action Party, a partner in Anwar’s coalition, would stop the call to prayer and force girls to wear skirts. 

It emerged only after parents and at least one set of grandparents complained to the newspapers. It’s led to a probe and public outrage. 

More importantly, it’s sparked questions about the level of political indoctrination by religious teachers in primary schools. The “creeping Islamisation” of Malaysia has been long warned about by political analysts and journalists as far back as the late 80s. It seems to have finally come home to roost. 

In many ways, the election revealed a fractured country cleaved along rural and urban lines among the Malays; secular and conservative lines among the races. 

For all the against-all-odds return of the Comeback Kid, Anwar Ibrahim is inheriting serious problems. 

He will need all the help, and luck, he can get. 

ENDS