In the past year and beyond, there have been a great many crises on the international and national stages that have shaken the people’s faith in core public institutions. They have ranged from the financial meltdown to political chicanery to judicial hubris and more. As a result, a widespread mood of distrust and pessimism has seeped into the public discourse and tends to colour the people’s opinion of their future prospects.
There is no denying that these negative developments would in some ways burden Najib Razak as he begins his tenure as Malaysia’s sixth prime minister. Indeed, the conventional wisdom on the online forums is that Najib is just as unlikely as his predecessor Abdullah Ahmad Badawi to accomplish the fundamental reforms that the country needs to rejuvenate itself.
The evidence is there in the Umno electoral process, for one, which has resisted all attempts by the party to rid itself of corruption. Abdullah’s repeated efforts to begin a new chapter in the police force by bringing it under the scrutiny of an independent commission, for another, have failed to bear fruit so far. And the list goes on.
So where can the people turn to for a new sense of hope, and a conviction that these troubles are merely challenges for a maturing nation to overcome, instead of the symptoms of an experimental society in terminal decline?
Najib can put his mind to these issues in due course, working on the underlying problems one step at a time. What he must unleash right at the beginning of his captaincy, however, is a spirit of endeavour that drives people to surmount the most daunting of obstacles, a creative energy that defies the odds.
In some ways, this sense of excitement was successfully awoken in the people by Mahathir Mohamad soon after he took office as the fourth prime minister. In his trademark brusque manner, he had often castigated the Malays in particular for their dependence on government support for opportunities ad infinitum. Aim to be the best, he told the people, and suddenly, they were game for a try.
It is this kind of zeitgeist that drove the Japanese people to rebuild their nation from the shattered shell that it was reduced to after the Second World War, into the economic dynamo that it became in just two decades.
Since the Mahathir years, new challenges have taken shape for Malaysians. Today, perhaps the effort to make the nation flourish again has become more difficult than before. We are now in a new paradigm where nationalistic ideas and business as usual are not enough for success. To understand what it will take for Malaysia’s star to shine requires us to envision the world, say two decades from now.
Can Najib give the people a new mantra that will bring the nation together as a united force to scale the next heights? Or will disunity, selfishness and greed drag us into a pit that future generations will be desperate to escape from? Only time, as the saying goes, will tell.
