The Making of an Asian tiger:Malaysia

The making of an Asian tiger: Malaysia
By Aisabor Osaloboh

A five -day visit, September 6-10, 1998, enabled me to obtain some first-hand information and a few insights into the making of an Asian “Tiger”. Although the visit came only a few weeks after the Government formally acknowledged that the country’s economy was in recession, I saw evidence of the economic transformation that the country had achieved during the two decades from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s.

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The new Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) is world-class and transport infrastructure in general is reputed to be of high quality, including the road network in the capital city. Other utilities are also reputed to be of high quality: telecommunication, electricity and water. The oil palm plantations on either side of the highway linking KLIA to the city and its suburbs provided a glimpse of the healthy development in the agriculture sector.

This is also confirmed by the relative abundance of food. Regarding social services, the average citizen could communicate comfortably in English – taxi drivers, sales persons in stores, hotel staff and so on. The cleanliness of the city was also a sign of a healthy environment, even though not yet of the “total cleanliness” model of Singapore. Above all, I was struck by the quality of the housing estates, including a very decent low-income estate in which a taxi driver had a flat.

The Prime Minister’s keynote address to the conference that brought me to KL confirmed his reputation as a visionary leader with strategic capacity, strong convictions, and supreme self-confidence. A book on Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed that I purchased at KLIA at my departure correctly calls him the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Malaysia Inc. However, the content of his speech also revealed elements of the governance environment that are partly responsible for the country’s current economic crisis. (Between mid-1997 and mid-1998, the Malaysian ringgit lost 40 per cent of its value and the stock market was deflated by 75%). Of the multiple causes of the crisis in the financial sector of the economy, he singled out the problem with currency manipulators as the most important and underplayed the poor regulation and supervision of the banking sector, “crony capitalism” (albeit on a smaller scale than Indonesia’s), and the problem of corruption, linked to the privatization process.

Significantly, serious disagreement between the PM and his deputy, Anwar Ibrahim, on how best to tackle the economic crisis led to the sacking of the latter in early September. But the official reason given for the sack – sexual misconduct and possible violations of national security – was obviously intended to hide the economic policy disagreement from both the domestic and international audiences to whom he had already presented Anwar as his successor. This leadership conflict also came at a time when there were criticisms of the PM’s growing intolerance of dissent and a justice system that appears to be at the service of the incumbent regime. In August, a member of parliament was sent to prison for criticizing a leader of the PM’s ruling party who had been accused of raping a 15-year old girl

How the country deals with both the sudden convergence of economic and political problems in the next 12 months will have serious consequences for its ambition to become a developed modern state by 2020. In the meantime, my overall impression of the country’s development performance is very positive. Striking achievements include the longest bridge in Asia (the link to the island of Penang), the PETRONAS towers (one of the tallest in the world), a concert hall and philharmonic orchestra, the relative social cohesion of a multi-ethnic society; and the provision of space for traditional rulers (the sultanates).The Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) that seeks to become Asia’s “Silicon Valley” is a testimony to the PM’s vision, strategic orientation and real mastery of the key ingredients of sustainable development: knowledge (mass education, cutting-edge knowledge, including IT), participation, and partnerships (both at the domestic and international levels). If the PM/CEO can achieve a smooth succession, vision 2020 could become a reality.

– Kuala-Lumpur, September 1998

Postscript

In 2003, Mahathir Mohammed was succeeded as Prime Minister by Abdullah Ahmad Badawi that he had hand-picked. His ruling party won elections again in 2013 under Prime Minister, Najib Razak, thereby extending its 56-year rule. The 2013 electoral defeat of Mahathir’s first designated successor-turned-opponent, Anwar Ibrahim, is likely to mark the end of his long struggle to rule Malaysia.