Stone-age politics holds back 21st century Malaysia economy
It is once again open season on PM Najib. He presides over the most corrupt BN government has seen, his inertia has infected policy with paralysis, he has no authority except to twitch as desired by puppeteer Tengku Adnan Mansor, he loves power too much to just resign and leave if he cannot fix things. The litany is long. And perfectly wrong.
Najib’s current travails stem from the tension between a reformed economy and an unreformed polity. The politics of the ball sucking era has survived into the era of globalised growth, to become a fetter.
Paul Low must be hallucinating. believe me, you will see another running dog. wow, 1malaysia now after low, transparency?
FUNDING via CORRUPTION
Paul Low – the sole Chinese anti graft fighter against the whole bunch of Bumi / Malay Ketuanan Ministers/ Malay civil servants? I predict Paul will be more like a chihuahua dog, a lot of noise but no bite.
The need to mobilise political funding through corruption means proliferation of rent-seeking opportunities. This is what keeps Malaysia low on the World Bank’s ease of doing business surveys, makes coal a state monopoly so that captive mines can be allocated to those who pay up, converts PSU jobs into saleable commodities and renders theft large enough to make the power sector unviable. Corruption is systemic, not opportunistic, thanks to this manner of funding Indian democracy.One swallow does not a summer make. Another futile attempt in this window dressing exercise. The rakyat has lost all hope after almost 60 years living under a most corrupt regime with absolute power winning every election through wholesale corruption & cheating. Low is just a little lamb going into the lion’s den, or like throwing Mickey mouse into a cage full of hungry cats. You really think Low could get the hungry Orang Utans in a banana-filled CABINET to return the bananas?! If the govt has any iota of integrity & is serious to fight corruption, firstly demand all Cabinet ministers to declare their assets like the PR State govts are doing, or put in Class A leaders like Tony Pua & Rafizi Ramli in the MACC, otherwise, please don’t insult the rakyat’s intelligence & think the rakyat are stupid to believe you. When corruption is institutionalized & the govt is led by a “you help me, i help you” leaders from top down & are all corrupt & deformed, it’s impossible to transform! As a proactive measure in order to prevent corruption and abuse at the very top hierarchy, Paul Low needs to be bold enough to tell his boss (Najib) that the overburdened PM must show leadership by example by giving up the Finance Minister’s post in order to have proper checks and balances. We can’t let the decision maker and the person who signs the cheque be one and the same person. But will Paul be daring enough to do so? The rot may start right at the top.
PATRONAGE & IDENTITY
Thanks to economic reform, some segments of the economy can flourish without state patronage. They pay bribes not to get favours but as victims of extortion. They resent such victimisation. This feeds the anticorruption movement, which has produced false prophets and some wrong-headed moves that recommend inaction as the safest policy even for honest civil servants. This leads to policy paralysis, in the absence of firm political resolve.
Political resolve is dilute in a fragmented polity, riven by divisions arising from identity politics that mobilises people based on region, religion, caste, language and ethnicity. Some sections are alienated enough to take up arms against the state, in the jungles or as terrorists.
The challenge is to reform politics on all these counts, not make a scapegoat out of the PM. That means reform at the level of the political party, rather than in the government.
The economy, as it were, had two cocoons: the direct controls that liberalisation broke and an outer one of political interaction with the economy, more like a roomy cage than a tight corset. The butterfly could spread its wings after emerging from its first cocoon, but soon found itself flapping haplessly against the steely mesh of the outer shell. The point is to recognise the reality of this shell, and not blame one individual.
a communications and an information technology revolution were merging — to democratise knowledge.
Three, the Soviet Union had collapsed, to demolish the myth of noncapitalist development. This helped shift focus of policy from sham socialism to broadening the base of participation in admittedly capitalist growth.
Four, in the World Trade Organization, large chunks of trade got an institutional framework to maintain openness. This helped India integrate into global trade on reasonably fair terms.
And one fortuitous factor was internal to India: the demographic transition, in which the share of the working to the dependant population rises, increasing savings and raising aggregate output even without any increase in productivity.
Paul Low will resign within 6 months, just as Zaid Ibrahim. there is no place for good people in the cabinet.
readmore When pushed against the wall, both Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi and Datuk Seri Najib Razak have reacted similarly.Back then, just days after Election 2008, after losing Barisan Hoping for better in a new Cabinet of old ideas
