Competency as the condition for political leadership

 

From Kua Kia Soong

Former education minister Maszlee Malik said recently that politicians should not be appointed to fill the posts of education and higher education ministers after the next general election and proposed that these positions should be filled by academics instead.

While I do not agree with him simply because academics are not necessarily competent visionaries, administrators or leaders, he does raise the all-important issue of ensuring that political leadership is based on competency.

Short-termism of liberal democracy has clearly failed

The existential question facing Malaysia and the rest of the liberal democratic world, including the US, is whether finding competent leaders is possible with the short-term thinking associated with politicians who perpetually face four-yearly elections.

For example, how many politicians in Malaysia and the rest of the other liberal democratic countries are knowledgeable enough and seriously committed to addressing the impact of the climate crisis for our grandchildren? I remember our former environment and water minister who told COP 27 that Malaysia does not suffer from the effects of climate change.

In Malaysia and several other countries where political parties no longer command a majority but are forced to make multi-party alliances, this problem becomes aggravated by the need to distribute Cabinet portfolios to other parties in the government.

Thus, after GE15, we see the education ministry helmed by a politician through convenience of political necessity; a politician facing multiple corruption charges being made deputy prime minister, and other ministries being helmed by veritable rookies. We further learned from the memoir of a former attorney-general that he had lobbied for the job years before his favoured political coalition won the general election.

Not only that, unelected politicians are given choice posts in GLCs and other government agencies, but the most inventive step was for unemployed politicians to be made “special advisers” to ministers as we saw in the last administration.

In some countries like Canada, directors of government agencies such as pension funds and sovereign wealth funds are selected carefully based on their expertise and qualifications, not political affiliation.

To pick another example, the finance ministry requires not just a competent minister but one who is not influenced by the barons of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) through class connections.

Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s jibes at Anwar Ibrahim’s handling of the 1997/1998 financial crisis when the latter favoured following the opinion of the IMF and the World Bank is instructive in this respect.

Competence plus commitment for the common good

Yes, competence must be wedded to a perspective that is for the common good. Take poverty eradication. How is it possible for China to take more than 800 million people out of poverty in a remarkably short time frame while “liberal democratic” countries fail repeatedly to achieve this? Surely, the missing quality of the so-called “freedom loving democrats” is the socialist commitment to raise the standard of living of the very poor.

Socialism requires a long-term plan of commitment to people, not profit. The Chinese experience has been tempered by decades of bitter experience since their revolution in 1949 but they seem to have now found a method that works through competent leadership and committed cadres numbering 96 million. And they are leading the world in greening their deserts, the production of renewable energy, high-speed rail and other infrastructure, not only in China but throughout the world.

Well, we are unlikely to have a socialist revolution in the foreseeable future and, as I have pointed out above, the “convenience government” we have inherited from GE15 has made meaningful reform nigh impossible since we could not even start from a clean slate with no Cabinet ministers facing any corruption charges. Political expediency and not competency was the criterion for Cabinet selection.

Still, with the leader of liberal democracy, the US facing a dire polarisation of its people and an impending national implosion, it is surely time for people to seriously question the political system we have and the way out of this dismal prospect for our children and our children’s children.

We would be naïve if we ignore the class interests of the political parties in the neo-liberal capitalist system of Malaysia and other “liberal democracies”.

After GE15, we can see that the lack of trust is endemic, and we are stuck in a stymied swamp of self-serving systems while the people suffer.

If nothing else, surely there must be a national consensus found for competency and integrity to be the criterion for political leadership and start by ensuring there is a competency test for the important public sector posts. - FMT

Kua Kia Soong is an academic and former MP.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.