Forging bold new formulas

MALAYSIA went through a heart wrenching rollercoaster in the weeks following the Sheraton Move (when various politicians met at the Sheraton Hotel on Feb 23 in Kuala Lumpur).

Some may be pleased with the new government while others are definitely not. Almost all can agree, however, that the kind of rampant politicking and instability we experienced is bad for Malaysia.

Today’s article is about specific strategies for bettering our nation, our democracy, and our future. Before jumping in, let’s try to understand what really happened in the past few weeks.

Many analysts have focused on individual personalities and shifting loyalties among the political elite. It’s important that we go beyond this surface and recognise the deep systemic problems that were the true root of what happened.

Firstly, politics as we know it today is driven largely by greed for money and power. Without this element, we would not have seen the crisis unfold as it did.

Secondly, our dysfunctional democracy concentrates far too much power at the top. While the old elite scheme more and more, the rakyat have less and less say over who leads our country, and what direction we move in as a nation.

Thirdly, the exercise was in no small part justified in racial terms, building on decades of racial division and divide and rule strategies.

When we recognise these as the core problems, it becomes clear that we need to move on from the questions of who betrayed who and who plotted what. This obsession with passively ogling feudal personality politics from afar must stop.

What we should focus on instead are questions of why principles are so absent from governance, what is it in the DNA and incentive structures of our democracy that produces unprincipled politicians, and how we can change the narrative of racial division.

After months of planning and work, a few friends and I are finally ready to launch our project focused on exactly those questions. We’re calling it “Projek Wawasan Rakyat” (POWR).

At its core, this project wants to throw out the formula of old narratives, old systems, and old elites – and replace them with a formula of new ideas, bold innovation, and youth-driven grassroots leadership.

Specifically, this project will focus on three core ideologies, encapsulated in three hashtags:

#Prinsip1st: Malaysia will never progress in the right direction unless we are firmly anchored in and guided by the right principles – particularly principles of integrity, compassion, and justice.

#Desentralisasi: Self-determination is the heart and soul of democracy. Where over-concentration of power in the top brings corruption and politicking, decentralisation enables the rakyat to choose better leaders, and actually determine their own fate.

#StrongerTogether: Racialised politics will always lead to racial division. To break the zero sum narratives of division, we need to build a new national unity narrative from the ground up – one that recognises how unity in diversity is the key to unlocking Malaysia’s true strength.

We cannot bring about these new narratives using old strategies. Relying on old elite politicians, tactics, and systems, will produce the same problems again and again – whichever political party is in power.

It’s time to leave behind the mentality that our nation’s future can only be determined by the machinations of politicians and trust in our own ability to lead and make a difference from the bottom up.

A few of us have thus decided to come together in Projek Wawasan Rakyat as a network of individuals (not a coalition of NGOs or a top down umbrella organisation) organised following a model that emphasises decentralised special purpose vehicles.

We also feel it is important that the core team of the project represents a truly diverse set of young Malaysians, and not be slanted to any one particular ideology or “sociocultural silo” – this is yet another way in which we want to replace old formulas with new ones.

My colleagues currently at the core of this project include Faisal Aziz (Abim), Altaf Deviyati (Iman Research), Tharma Pillai (Undi18), and Alexandra John (Sarawak Women for Women Society). We expect to add a few more soon.

Importantly, the organisations listed above are not “endorsing organisations”, as each of us are participating in our individual capacities. The organisations are merely listed as external affiliations and networks to which the individuals are connected.

While these are the core coordinators, we have been and will continue engaging with a much larger group of dynamic youth (and elders). Our various initiatives will all have autonomous management teams of their own, and will showcase talented, capable young leaders.

One of our early initiatives may be a Kabinet Rakyat, where groups of young experts can shadow ministries to provide feedback on initiatives as well as draft policy papers of their own.

As a whole, POWR will look to operate in three main areas: narrative engineering via media, laboratories for new ideas (like Kabinet Rakyat), and the building of social capital through networking – especially among all the dynamic activists already doing great work out there.

We are not starting off as a political platform or party, because given our views of Malaysian “democracy” as is practiced today, we believe that if our founding question is “How do we win elections?”, then we become part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Being part of the solution means starting with the question “How can we drive a commitment to principles, democracy, and unity so firmly into the heart of a movement that nothing can shake it?”

The old systems and strategies have gone as far as they can go. It’s time for an overhaul, a paradigm shift, and a genuinely fresh way of doing things.

The first politically defined version of a New Malaysia turned out to be hollow and not very new at all – because we didn’t lay the right foundations for building something really different from before. We took shortcuts, and where we are today is a perfectly logical consequence of taking those shortcuts.

This time, we’ve decided to take the long, hard road, one where there will be many difficult conversations ahead. But just as those kinds of conversations and arguments are necessary to building any genuinely intimate marriage or relationship, they are necessary to any genuine nation-building.

These challenges will test us all as a nation, but if I’m correct in believing that there is a real love for one another as fellow Malaysians underpinning all else – a love that overpowers everything the elites have done to divide us – then I have full faith we will prevail.

Nathaniel Tan hopes you’ll join him on that long, hard road (website in progress: www.rakyat.org). He can be reached at [e-mail]. The views expressed here are entirely his own.