Given the previous failures of all prominent slogans, Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s “Malaysia Madani” one is perhaps ill-advised but let’s also look at how it can succeed even as all others have failed.
From the time of independence in 1957, we have been a sloganeering nation but truth be told hardly anything has come out of it. In the last 40 years, slogans have come and gone but like trains to nowhere, it has not taken us anywhere.
Former premier Dr Mahathir Mohamad started his first term in 1981 with the “Bersih, cekap dan amanah” (clean, efficient and trustworthy) catch-phrase but his administration over 22 years was hardly that and quite the contrary, taking the administration to new lows over the three words, lows from which we are still trying hard to recover from.
His successor Abdullah Ahmad Badawi came up with the idea of “Islam Hadhari” which could be translated loosely as civilisational Islam, using the precepts of the faith such as honesty, integrity, respecting minorities, balanced development etc.
Najib Abdul Razak came up with the self-explanatory “1Malaysia” - Malaysia for all. He set up 1MDB and promptly syphoned billions of ringgit of borrowed money out of the self-styled national strategic development company. He now languishes in jail.
Mahathir, in his second term - older and even wilier - dispensed with slogans altogether and attempted to make himself effectively a dictator, absolutely refusing to keep his promise to pass the baton to Anwar and plunging the nation into crisis yet again.
I had to look up emergency abah Muhyiddin Yassin’s tagline “Kerajaan Prihatin” (Caring Government). Caring indeed - he had to resort to an emergency to avoid facing Parliament to stay in power as his razor-thin majority was under constant threat of being challenged.
And he engineered a Sabah state election in the middle of Covid-19, spreading the virus far and wide. That’s how much he cared. Which leads us to his successor who most people had not heard of before that, Umno vice-president Ismail Sabri Yaakob.
Hardly tight-knit
Ismail Sabri, who has the dubious distinction of being the shortest-serving PM in Malaysia, proudly referred to us all as “Keluarga Malaysia” (Malaysian family).
He, unfortunately, succumbed to pressure from Umno, especially its bigoted president then and now Ahmad Zahid Hamidi who, encouraged by results from state elections, thought that Umno would win an early general election. Thus, GE15 - the election nobody was prepared for - was prematurely delivered by caesarean section with disastrous consequences.
What followed was the most fractious, racist, religiously charged and divisive election ever held in Malaysia - hardly family-like. Umno got the shock of its life, winning just 26 parliamentary seats - its worst ever showing by far, less than half its already abject showing at GE14 where it won 54 seats, still then the party with the largest number of seats.
But by an incredible unanticipated twist of fate arising from this strange, perplexing new phenomenon called coalition politics in Malaysia, Zahid became one of two deputy prime ministers in Anwar’s cabinet in a fragile grouping of parties partly decreed by royalty and partly by a coincidence of circumstances. Ismail Sabri fell by the wayside, not even a minister in the so-called unity government.
Madani break down
With such a lack of success in sloganeering in Malaysia, Anwar would have been well-advised to stay clear of it but it has been done and the slogan “Malaysia Madani” is out there. So let’s look at it, break it down - and well, yes, give it a chance to succeed even as all previous ones in the last few decades have failed miserably.
While “Madani” conjures up visions of Medina and of Islamic civilisation much like Islam Hadhari, it is actually a rather awkward and contrived Malay acronym for six core words which seem to have been adopted as the basis of policy-making - sustainability, prosperity, innovation, respect, trust and compassion (see below).
Frankly, this is the first time I have seen an acronym taken from letters or sounds other than the first one in the word. It is downright confusing and does nothing to help the memorisation of the keywords and identifying it with the acronym.
Clearly, it is contrived to get the word “Madani” in and its links to Islamic precepts.
In any case, this is not genius - such things have to be taken into account in any civilised society anywhere and are universal values anyway. There is no need to insert an artificial Islamic construct into the whole to just score some political points, especially when the process has to be as contrived as this.
For slogans to become alive and not stay as nice sound bites to broad policy-making, they have to be acted upon in practice by a programme of implementation with specific measurable targets and deadlines for implementation. Without that, no slogan is worth even the paper that it is printed on.
A couple of examples will help: When public pieces of land intended as green areas are being de-gazetted for greedy companies and individuals, even by Pakatan Harapan-controlled states like Selangor, isn’t the talk of sustainability (kemampanan) empty and hollow?
And what will the government do to ensure that the resources of the country such as oil and gas and the revenue from it are utilised for future generations as the concept of sustainability requires us to do? Where’s our oil fund?
Is it compassionate (ihsan) to continue to have laws which permit detention without trial and detention during an investigation, and turn a blind eye to deaths and torture in lock-ups throughout the country? What about labour trafficking and the atrocious conditions migrant labour have to work under, a sore point with our Indonesian friends and others?
Slogans are easy. Making them work in the true spirit of them actually being a cornerstone of policy-making is another matter altogether. And we wait eagerly for this unity government to tell us how they are going to do that.
Anwar’s Malaysia Madani skeleton badly needs fleshing out. - Mkini
P GUNASEGARAM, a former editor at online and print news publications and head of equity research is an independent writer, analyst, and consultant.
The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of MMKtT.
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