Malaysia Baru: Picking up where we left off

Note: Reposting this in October 2022, as the country heads towards the 15th General Election. Now more than ever, we need to reaffirm a vision of a plural, resilient, and open Malaysia.

The year 2021 was another year of disruption, uncertainty, and tragedy. Naturally, we are hoping that 2022 will be the year that things start to turn around on many fronts.

There are encouraging signs that suggest the pandemic may have very few truly unprecedented tricks left to throw at us at this point.

Throughout the long pandemic summer, we have seen how negatively a system-wide disruption can affect the most vulnerable among us, and how brittle our global economy can be.

It has also laid bare the brutality of global inequality, which we continue to see through vaccine inequity between the Global North and the Global South, higher mortality rates for ‘essential workers’ while the richest quartiles of society have not only emerged unscathed but are also somehow richer than before.

Anyone who’s managed to pull through the worst of the past two turbulent years, scarred but surviving, should count themselves as being very lucky.

Here at home, we have also collectively felt the tragic impact of the pandemic. Most individuals would have experienced the loss of a family member, friend or colleague (for the dead cannot speak), and would have felt directly in varying degrees its economic impact.

There is no sugar-coating it, the past two years have been really hard.

Now that we’re here at the start of a new year, facing the spread of another variant, and racing against time to, again, vaccinate as widely as possible, there is a sense of déjà vu.

At the same time, everything else in the country seemed to have been frozen in place: politics, wages, healthcare capacity, civil liberties, etc. The disruptive events of 2020 and their wide range of adverse effects have proven to be sticky.

They shouldn’t be. What we have learnt from the tragedies of the past two years must be the grounds for a fresh resolution to move forward. We have been made painfully aware of (our) weaknesses and failings that may have been obscured in the heady euphoria of Malaysia Baru post-2018. Yet at the same time, perhaps we need to revisit the idea.

Reconstituting Malaysia Baru

Was Malaysia Baru a false dawn? At this juncture, it does feel like that. People have little reason to trust the government or established political players more than ever before, and they in turn seem more likely to collude and collaborate with one another instead of reaching out to the ordinary Malaysian.

The titled classes are too isolated from the common folk, which make their expressions of sympathy and solidarity unconvincing at best. How could people believe in a Malaysia Baru blared from grand offices when people are left stranded for days on the rooftops of their flooded houses?

The vision needs to be reconstituted and refined. To desire a fairer, better, more inclusive country where the people’s needs and voices mattered, there is nothing wrong with that. However, it needs to be tempered with the knowledge and harsh realities of the country that we are trying to change, and commonly deliberated across divisions in societies.

Malaysia Baru, restored from the ground up, needs to be a vision shared by broader society, and not exclusive to any particular political leaning. It may sound obvious but it bears repeating: people do not like to be patronised and told that something is good or bad for them without them ever getting involved in the conversation.

As we have often seen, pushing through a national agenda without enough public goodwill only leads to distrust and rejection.

Green shoots emerge

Not all is gloomy. Positive development of the past two years is the strengthening of grassroots networks and initiatives. Rather than wait for instructions to filter down from the powers-that-be, groups of individuals have been quick to organise to respond to crises and as forms of resistance.

Built on banks of competent volunteers, these initiatives were able to gain Malaysians’ trust and financial support to help them carry out their programmes. From Kita Jaga Kita, Bendera Putih, Lawan, to Darurat Banjir, these initiatives were heavily driven by volunteers who wanted to help out without having to deal with deep-set internal politics and layers of red tape.

This is filtering more and more into other areas, including politics, as people gravitate towards movements that give them the space to pursue agendas they identify with, rather than obediently follow the dictates of a distant leadership.

In her recent article on youth political participation, Dr Meredith Weiss made note of three examples of this shift: YPolitics for the civic education effort, Abim for their ideological innovation, and reform for their push for institutional reform.

These are among the organisations that seek to empower Malaysians towards more active citizenship through new and creative ways. It may be too soon to tell if these developments will be able to significantly impact the country’s direction, but it does suggest that people are serious about seeking alternatives to what has been on offer.

Resuming the Malaysia Baru project will need new energy, ideas, and approaches, and preparedness to break with the usual way of doing business.

Malaysians want to see the country move forward and are willing to explore and participate in new options which can be more dynamic and responsive, rather than wait for a charismatic leader to appear and come save them.

Established players must listen and learn to adapt if they still want to be part of the conversation.

Originally published in Malaysiakini on January 11 2022