All Malaysians of a certain age will remember the boisterous confidence of the 1990s. The stock market was booming, the economy was the darling of investors, and everyone was making money. Politically, Malaysia had come through a rough patch at the end of the 1980s, and everyone was eager to look forward, beyond the traumatic events of Ops Lallang and the deregistration and rebirth of Umno and the fiercely-contested general elections of 1990 that saw Kelantan fall back into the stewardship of PAS. Many were still disgruntled, or fiercely opposed to the iron fist of Mahathirian authoritarianism, but the rise of Anwar at that time gave hope that there was a more liberal future in store for Malaysia. Understandably, some Malaysians looked at the political upheavals of the late 1980s and decided “that’s enough for me, I’m off“, leaving the country for different shores. But for those left behind, the 1990s had a balming effect of soothing the wounds of the body politic with the elixir of rising wealth and prosperity.
One of the slogans (and there were many, during the Mahathir era) that truly captured that moment in time was “Malaysia Boleh“. A pithy and confident assertion of can-do positiveness – our very own version of the American Dream. After the trauma of 1969 and the political battles of the 1970s and 1980s, Malaysians were finally ready to step into the sunshine of economic prosperity. The fall of the Berlin Wall gave rise to a unipolar world, in which the US presided over a new age of globalisation, as the tendrils of capitalism extended outwards into the frontiers of the the Third World, and Malaysia was standing ready to welcome intrepid investors into the brave new world of emerging markets.
Never one to miss a grand opportunity, Mahathir parlayed his utter political dominance into a flourish of edifice-building and infrastructure investments. The North-South Highway had whetted his appetite – and likely enriched his party’s coffers as well! – and he took Malaysia into a new era of infrastructure investments: KLIA. The new stadia and new hotels and new train systems for the Commonwealth Games. The Petronas Twin Towers. And for the coup de grace, Malaysia was to unveil a whole new capital city, built from scratch with petrodollars out of the marshes and oil palm plantations of Prang Besar.
Much ink has been split, of course, over the eventual economic boom-and-bust of the 1990s. There was definitely irrational exuberance, and the collapse of many of the premier conglomerates of that age were textbook cases of corporate overreach. “Malaysia Boleh” became licence for frantioc dealmaking, and everything was being fueled by cheap credit and a stonkingly-bullish stock market. There was already blowback even then: “Malaysia Boleh” came to be viewed with bitterness and cynicism by a number of Malaysians who saw their country’s transformation into “Bolehland“, where anything goes, as long as one had the wealth, or power (ideally, both) to push one’s way through the red lines of regulations and morality.
But there was also another, darker psychological side of “Malaysia Boleh“: the race for performative “achievements” became a favourite mode of expression, especially for those eager to curry favour with those in power. The longest Malaysian flag. The longest satay barbecue. Biggest cake. Biggest ketupat. Swimming over the English Channel (as if there weren’t already hundreds, if not thousands, of others who had already done the same.) Climbing Everest.
Not to dismiss some of these deeds – I cannot ever imagine climbing Everest, or even having the desire to, really. But too many of these “achievements” were clearly low-ball efforts at garnering attention. And it laid bare the contradictions at the heart of the “Malaysia Boleh” project – we wanted attention and recognition from the world, but often unwilling to do the hard things that would be truly meritorious. Biggest flag, tallest flag pole – boleh. Eradicating politik wang, weaning the economy off cheap foreign labour, paying Malaysians fair wages for the work that they do – these ones tak boleh.
And this frustration strikes at the core of today’s Malaysia Madani project: what are we doing now that is so different, now that we have a man who was probably unjustly imprisoned and shut out of power for more than two decades, now at the helm of the government? Two decades of calling for Reformasi. What is so different now? Why are we still playing the same old games of state propaganda – the slogans and the logos and the theme songs? Why are we still treating appointments to state agencies and government-linked companies as ghanimah? And why is it that for the truly hard and necessary measures that we need to enact, to bring out the potential for our great nation, the answer is still “tak boleh”?