Press statement/Letter to the Editor by Lim Teck Ghee and Din Merican
UMNO Vice President Tan Sri Muyhiddin Yassin was recently reported to have said that non-Bumiputra leaders in Barisan Nasional have the responsibility to make their respective communities understand the spirit of the NEP (NST 15 July 07). He would have demonstrated greater statesmanship had he also stressed that it is equally incumbent upon UMNO leaders to explain to their party supporters that a spirit of equal accommodation by the Malay community taking into account the concerns of other communities – including that of non-Malay Bumiputra – is equally necessary. These concerns are especially pertinent in areas where the Malays are well established or enjoy dominance - such as in the universities, the public sector and GLCs – and wherever NEP targets have been accomplished or exceeded. Tolerance, understanding, goodwill and the spirit of give and take by all communities is needed if the country is to prosper and meet the challenges of globalization.
A spirit of willing sacrifice and mutual accommodation is possible if all stakeholders are fully aware of what the NEP has achieved; what its shortfalls are; who have benefited and who have been left behind; what programs have worked and which have failed; and where inefficiencies, leakages and wastage have taken place. An open, rigorous and transparent stocktaking of NEP policies with regard to poverty alleviation, restructuring of public and private sectors, corporate equity ownership, government procurement, education, urban development, and other contested sectors can provide the starting point for building a new national solidarity and consensus. At the same time, only a new road map based on more equitable, enlightened and inclusive principles can bring out the best amongst all communities. Only a new socio-economic order based on national unity, equity, justice and growth – one in which Malay and non-Malay marginalized and vulnerable are provided equitable assistance combined with a system of meritocracy that rewards the best, irrespective of race - can guarantee the future for our country.
In 1990, when the NEP was coming to an end, our country faced a similar crossroads such as we are facing now. At that time, the Government established a National Economic Consultative Council (NECC) to provide the country with a post-1990 vision and road map. Incidentally, the final drafting committee for the NDP was headed by Dato Seri Abdullah bin Haji Ahmad Badawi, our present Prime Minister, in his capacity as the head of the UMNO delegation in the Council.
A similar consultative council is urgently needed now to iron out differences that have arisen among all stakeholders, including those in the Barisan Nasional, over the necessity of continuation of NEP policies and the new road map that is necessary to meet the many external and internal challenges. A new NECC under an eminent, independent and non-politically aligned chair-person is the right forum where the many complex issues of poverty and wealth distribution, ethnic and other disparities and imbalances, and other sensitive issues can be analyzed and dissected with candor by the best minds of the country to benefit all Malaysians. We owe it especially to our young generation to prevent the further hijacking and looting of public resources, and other abuses, that have blighted past NEP policies. We owe it to them to build an enduring society based on principles of equity, fairness and justice applicable and acceptable to all Malaysians.
Press Statement on Ijok By Elections: Reject Politics of Deceit, Opportunism and Covert Bribery Dr. Lim Teck Ghee
I call on Ijok voters to turn out in full force on 28 April and to decisively reject the politics of deceit, opportunism and covert bribery by voting for the opposition and Parti Keadilan Rakyat candidate, Tan Sri Khalid Ibrahim.
By doing so, the humble Ijok inhabitants will set an example to all Malaysians on the use of the democratic vote and ballot box to send these important messages to the ruling Barisan Nasional
• Malaysians are not the docile and easy-to-buy electorate that BN politicians take everyone (including themselves) to be • the Malaysian electorate expects more from their elected representative and party than sporadic service and work • Ijok inhabitants will not be co-opted, intimidated or browbeaten into choosing their representative by the unfair use of what should be politically neutral public resources
I also wish to express my strong endorsement of Parti Keadilan and Tan Sri Khalid as the right party and right candidate to bring the Ijok people into the mainstream of development, a path denied to this poor marginalized region for so long, despite the constituency’s support of the BN for many years.
Whatever the outcome on 28 April, Parti Keadilan’s and the larger opposition’s campaign in Ijok is opening a new page in Malaysian political history by breaking the Barisan Nasional mould of self-serving and self-enriching elite bargaining. The partnership by the multi-ethnic opposition and civil society volunteers in Ijok brings hope that Malaysians can rise above the selfish and opportunistic racial partisanship perfected by the Barisan Nasional; and also that our young people – Malays, Chinese, Indians and others - can work together for a brighter common future based on the shared values and sacrifice of all Malaysians.
During Mahathirism in the 1980s – change management ideology pervaded the psyche of the civil service sector. The ideology was enculturalised by the corporate sector and universities picked up the trend and fashioned it into their mission statement, pedagogical processes, and curriculum. Everybody was taught to speak the language of change.
During that time too, circa 1985-1995, even high school students were taught visioning strategies and how to manage change.
Literature of change management, i.e. to change to corporate culture, to change to a society run on cybernetics/information technology became hugely popular.
Knowledge of visioning strategies were brought to the grassroots and even kampong people were in tune with the basic ideas of change sometimes equating it with the Arabic words "islah" and "hijrah" to denote and connote "reforming oneself" and "pilgrimag-ising oneself".
The Malay word "perubahan paradigma" became perhaps the most popular word on television, as its use signified a "better level of intelligence" as perceived by Malaysians imbued with "corporatist ideology".
Nowadays we hear people speaking of "blue ocean strategy"-- on how to look at our environment as an ocean of both chaos and opportunities and how to think like a dolphin but act like a shark.
The Mahathirist decades essentially prepared Malaysians for that only one thing that is permanent: change. It prepared the country for even for a velvet revolution such as in the Mar 8, 2008 and Permatang Pauh. When he unveiled the mega-project Multimedia Super Corridor (The MSC) which included the Bill of Guarantees for the free-flow of information and no-censorship of the Internet, he called upon the rakyat to "fantasise" with him.
At the moment of writing this article, it is 7 o'clock in the evening (New York) Eastern Time Sept 15. My question is - what will tomorrow bring when Sept 16 comes. Are we ready for political change - big time?
Political change
My initial thought is this: corporate cultural changes occur peacefully - why not political change?
In light of a benchmarked and scheduled possible change Malaysians will be experiencing and in light of the deliverable promised, I am advocating the new regime to disseminate 10 ideas that will augur well with the new era we are ushering into, I call them "ten steps towards cultural freedom" this nation can conditioned itself with.
Independence and freedom are not slogans but existential states of mind and a condition of 'lived democracy', one in which citizens are aware of how oppressive systems are cultivated. We cannot be independent until we arrive at these historical junctures, and until we do the following:
1. Free the human mind from all forms of dogmas, superstitions, mental chains, hegemonic formations, and transitional levels of totalitarianism. Our educational system at all levels must strengthen the scientific and philosophical foundation of its curriculum and practices to effect changes in the higher-order thinking skills of the next generation. We should not tolerate any forms of bigotry, racial chauvinism, and retarded form of democracy in our educational system.
2. Understand the relationship between the 'self and the system of social relations of production' and how the self becomes alienated and reduced to labour and appendages and cogs in the wheels of industrial system of production, a system that hides under the name of the corporatist nation and any other term that masks the real exploitation of the human self.
3. Make ourselves aware that our social systems, through the rapid development of technology and its synthesis with local and international predatory culture, have helped create classes of human beings that transform their bodies into different classes of labour (manual, secretarial, managerial, militarial, intellectual, and capital-owning) that is now shaping the nature of class antagonism locally and globally.
4. Understand how our political, economic, cultural institutions have evolved and are created out of the vestiges of newer forms of colonialism, institutions that are built upon the ideology of race-based interpretations of human and material development that benefit the few who own the means of cultural, material, and intellectual production.
5. Understand how ideologies that oppress humanity works, how prevailing political, economic, cultural ideologies help craft false consciousness and create psychological barriers to the creation of a society that puts the principles of social contract into practice.
6. Be aware of how our physical landscape creates spaces of power and knowledge and alienates us and how huge structural transformations such as the Multimedia Super Corridor or those emerging corridors that create a new form of technological city-scape (technopoles) that benefits local and international real estate profiteers more that they provide more humane living spaces for the poor and the marginalised in an increasingly cybernated society.
7. Be fully aware of the relationship between science, culture, and society and how these interplay with contemporary global challenges and how we clearly or blindly adopt these rapid changes and transform them into our newer shibboleths of developmentalism – one such policy being the National BioTechnology Program.
8. Put a halt to the systematic stupefication of academicians and students in our public universities by first incorporating Academic Freedom Clauses in their mission statements and next enculturalising intellectualism in these learning environments. The public universities must be restructured based on a new paradigm of leadership. Leaders that enable the ability of our students and faculty to think must be removed and replaced with those that pay allegiance to truth. "Veritas!" or "Truth!" as Harvard University sloganises and lives by.
9. Design an economic system founded upon socialistic principles that meet the needs of the many and curb our enthusiasm to consume conspicuously and consequently create a society divided by classes and a postmodern caste system. Rethink the progressive dimension of nationalisation instead of pursuing the excesses of privatisation. What good would Malaysia do if its leaders are siphoning the nation's wealth by the billions, stashing them in places such as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands?
10. Restructure the entire education system that would not only create some variant of a classless society but also one that would evolve into a reflective one instead of being rushed to death along the path of Wall Street by those who owns the means of production.
Sept 16 and change.
We know Sept 16 is past but its significance remains a challenge to be met by all of us believers.
We know that radical changes will happen. We know we are ready for such changes. What we need is the will to realign ourselves with the new paradigm and to medicate ourselves of the pain that will come through the changes.
Change is good especially of it means celebrating our diversity, curbing our desire for material wealth, punishing those who have stolen form the masses, and making our systems implement equity, equitability, equal opportunity, and empathy as philosophical elements of change.
But Lao Tzu did warn us too against carving the stone.
Press statement by Dr. Lim Teck Ghee on World Bank President
As a former World Bank staff member, I wish to call on the Malaysia Executive Director to the World Bank, representing Malaysia and ten other Asia Pacific countries in the Bank’s governing board, to do the right thing and ask for the immediate resignation of the President, Paul Wolfowitz, for his role in securing an unacceptably high pay rise and promotion for his partner in violation of the Bank’s own rules. Other Bank staff members providing support to his actions should be identified and punished.
The actions of Wolfowitz are a reminder of how easily leaders in high office - despite their rhetoric of high principles and ethical standards - fall prey to self interests and engage in unethical practices that undermine the effectiveness of the institutions they are entrusted to lead. The more important lesson to learn is that stakeholders must be vigilant to misconduct of leaders; should demand absolute integrity at all times; and should punish those that have strayed from the straight and narrow. Transgressions that go undetected or unpunished will only embolden leaders to engage in further acts of corruption and deceit, and encourage a culture of hypocrisy.
To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer he slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish’d.
— from William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Saudara RPK,
I hope they are treating you well, in this holy month of Ramadhan that is turning our nation into our Ramallah.I write in a state of being free while you languish in sadness incarcerated by those in their dying days breathing painfully.
They say that you are anti-Islam and anti-government. The are wrong on both counts. You are a great defender not only of Islam but of other faiths. You are a great defender of a sane government yet to be installed and one that will gladly set you free.
They are fearing not you nor the voices of conscience no longer in the wilderness; they are fearing themselves – their Inner Self – that they are answering to in their scramble to satisfy their greed for material wealth and lust for power.
They have not made you a bankrupt, RPK. They themselves are drowned in riches that will bury them.Sdr. RPK. I hope your incarceration will be the brief. So too will be of the others.The rakyat feels that the present government will not be the one freeing you. A new one will.
Below I reproduce a tribute to you I wrote sometime ago.
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There is so much sadness in our nation as we bemoan the imprisonment of a voice of conscience manifested in this individual called Raja Petra Kamaruddin.
There is so much anger in our consciousness as we wonder what justice denied can do to us as we see the rot in our cultural values and political lives — right in front of our eyes, feasted through the media.
Raja Petra is seeking deep in his inner self and journeying deep into the archeology of his consciousness and into the history of his self and his ancestors, seeking solace and guidance in what next to be done in this world in which the self argues and revolts against systems of oppression. His psyche and the journey of his soul perhaps bring him to a hill in Melaka some several centuries ago — a place where the legendary philosopher-king and the Bugis warrior stood on a hill riddled with bullets from the advancing Dutch colonials. Raja Haji died standing .
Raja Petra is a gifted human being who is showing us what Henry David Thoreau, the American transcendentalist, spoke about “civil disobedience. He is what the philosopher Karl Jaspers reminded us of the urge to disobey and ideology that has become corrupt to the core and has employed the state apparatuses to silence those who speak truth to power.
Raja Petra is what Che Guevara means to Malaysians, a gung-ho revolutioner whose interest in motorcycles helped him craft his own hugely successful “motorcycle diaries??? and helped him symbolize and embody the free-wheeling spirit of Americanism of the “Easy Rider era???.
Raja Petra is the symbol of the yearning in us to break free and to let out these “screams of consciousness??? so that we may learn to understand better what actually is the problem with this nation that needs therapy as a consequence of its obsession with law and order it creates and it destroys. It is the Brahma-Shiva-Vishnu of politics that we are seeing at play in the cosmic cycle, this karma of Malaysian politics that is meeting its end of the yuga as consequences to the production of many duryodanas (Durjanas) in the process of birth and rebirth.
Raja Petra is a Bugis warrior who installs kings and umpires and players in this game of politics we all are asked to play for fifty years. He make us conscious of the complexities of power relations, the roles of individuals in installing ideologies, the power of institutions in designing “inscriptions that alienate people??? and helps us understand the nature of Malaysia’s interlocking directorates — of who owns what and what are the consequences of these.
Raja Petra is a commander-in-chief of a movement that exists in cyberspace and orchestrates the powerful dialogues that send shivers to the spines of those who cheats in this political game.
Raja Petra has shown us what jihad means and how we must carry on this revolution to its final destiny — a republic of virtue in which philosophy reigns supreme over ideology, whatever the ideology may be.
Raja Petra will be out soon, to carry on the revolution in the consciousness of men and women — a perpetual revolution that forces us to look at ourselves as historical beings and wonder “what have we done to make this country as it is in which justice is denied, delayed, and dictated by the few.???
But there will always be Divine Justice, if one believes in the power of the Divine — in a Just God and God of Mercy and Compassionate who works in mysterious ways and one who works through the agency called human beings — that will make things end well, even if all is not well in the beginning of things.
“Man proposes God disposes???, many have said. In us all, in the humiliation wrought upon this human being called Raja Petra and in the imprisonment of this voice of conscience, lies the mystery of revelation of justice. We shall see what lies ahead. We must, however continue to become makers of history — to protest either silently or out loud either in solitude or with others in pomp and pageantry, protest we must as we are essentially human beings born free with natural rights endowed by the Creator. Borrowing Rousseau, we believe that “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains…???
Protest we must. Investigate we must too. Demands we will orchestrate in order to have corrupt men and women, powers abusers amongst us, and swindling robber-barons amidst us to be brought to justice in the court of law that shall be governed by the people, through the will of the rakyat.
The rakyat awaits your homecoming, a candlelight vigil will adorn the street in front of the prison-industrial complex built by those who designed architecture of structural-violence, unseen by the naked eyes of the rakyat. Like the candles that await Sita Devi and like the candle-lights that bathes Jalaluddin Rumi, the light from the rakyat soothes and calms your bruised spirit in their patient wait for your freedom.
A grandchild of that Bugis warrior prince, a philosopher-ruler, better that many a prince Machiavelli pays tribute to– you are a voice of conscience and you shall be free. Free at last.. free at last…
Hang in there, RPK. This is your bohemian rhapsody. Hang in there for a few days, weeks, Saudara RPK.This is my humble gift to thee. May these words renew your spirit.
And the rakyat will not take it to the streets either. They will stay home and watch the soap opera on race and religion played to an audience of none. They will wait and see which government will set you free.
Here is Shakespeare’s piece for thee, in its entirety:
To be, or not to be (from Hamlet 3/1)
To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish’d.
To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: there’s the respect That makes calamity of so long life; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment.
With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action. - Soft you now! The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remember’d.
IN HONOR OF RPK, TERESA KOK, AND ALL THOSE DETAINED INDEFINITELY, PLEASE POST APPROPRIATE COMMENTS ONLY; COMMENTS CALLING FOR PEACE AND CALM IN TIMES OF MANUFACTURED CHAOS.
RPK AND THOSE DETAINED WOULD APPRECIATE THIS, I AM SURE. MAY GOD SAVE THIS NATION AND INSTALL JUSTICE AND EQUALITY FOR ALL RACES.
STAY CALM, BE UNITED IN DIVERSITY — THE ISSUE IS NEITHER RACE NOR RELIGION. IT IS ABOUT A PEACEFUL TRANSITION OF POWER AND THE DECONSTRUCTION OF COMMUNAL POLITICS.
During that time too, circa 1985-1995, even high school students were taught visioning strategies and how to manage change.