Gauging The Effectiveness Of Third World Leaders

 Gauging The Effectiveness Of Third World Leaders

M. Bakri Musa

 

 

A Third World leader’s effectiveness is inversely related to the West’s adulation of him or her. The more that leader is being fawned upon in the West, the less likely is he or she to be effective back home.

 

            The late President Corazon Aquino of the Philippines was idolized in the West. She was even granted the rare privilege of addressing a joint session of the United States Congress. Meanwhile back home, her nation was fast spiraling into an abyss. 

 

Few in the West (or the Third World) could name the leaders of Taiwan. Yet that nation had for decades bested China as well as much of the world. Taiwan leaders’ commitment to “Asian values” notwithstanding, at one time more than half of the Taiwanese cabinet sported doctorates from leading American universities. Her public health leaders’ handling of the Covid-19 pandemic was applauded worldwide. Mandarin, Taiwan’s official language, may be spoken by more people worldwide, but the Taiwanese do not regard learning English or studying in the West as tidak mertabatkan (disrespecting) their own language, culture, or institutions.   

 

Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew was universally regarded as an effective leader. However, his recognition came late. Early on he was treated as another pugnacious city mayor. During one of his early campaigns, he was pushed over into a monsoon drain. That did not faze him. Even the United States Central Intelligence Agency had earlier thought of him as but another of your typical corrupt push-over Third World leaders. They tried to bribe him, and when that failed, attempted blackmail.

 

All these are but my long preamble to noting Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s recent flurry of hobnobbing with world leaders and appearances on glittering global stages. Meanwhile the three perennial critical problems crippling Malaysia–entrenched corruption, weak institutions in particular rotten schools, and rising Islamism–fester. 

 

There is little that Prime Minister Anwar could learn on combatting corruption by visiting London or Washington, DC. They have their own versions of that scourge. Likewise with fixing Malaysian schools. Many American public schools are but mass warehouses for her young, not worthy of our emulation. 

 

Instead, you can learn much on tackling both issues by visiting leaders across the causeway. Those visits would also be far cheaper and more convenient, with no distressing jet lag afterwards.

 

One African leader who unabashedly emulated Lee is Rwanda’s Paul Kagame. In Kigali, the capital city, you can eat your lunch by the roadside drains as they are so well maintained. If Kagame could do that in Rwanda, so can Anwar in Malaysia.

 

As for combatting Islamism and religious extremism, Prime Minister Anwar could learn more from the West, specifically America. France is also the West but her secularism is of a different variety. Unlike America whose secularism means state neutrality in matters of faith, France’s version has an underlying virulent anti-religious strain to it. An understandable counter reaction considering that nation’s history with medieval Christianity.

 

Anwar has nothing to learn from other Muslim countries or leaders on how to deal with religious extremism, a cancer gnawing at Malaysia and crippling Malays. Instead, learn from America, specifically her church-affiliated institutions like Georgetown and Notre Dame Universities as well as prep schools like Massachusetts’s Groton and New Hampshire’s St. Paul.

 

Georgetown and Notre Dame, despite their church affiliations, have excellent programs in Islamic Studies. However at Malaysia’s International Islamic University, Shiite literature is kept under lock and key! Groton and St. Paul would be excellent models for Malaysian residential and Tafriz schools. Only a tiny portion of Groton’s graduates end up in the clergy. Such schools contribute more than their share of America’s scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs.

 

During his years in the political wilderness, Anwar was privileged to have spent time at Oxford, Georgetown, and Johns Hopkins. Renew those ties. Invite his former colleagues there to give private seminars to his cabinet. Emulate President Ronald Reagan. He used to have such intellectual luminaries as George Will, James Q Wilson, and William F Buckley, Jr., to the White House for private dinners cum “tutoring” sessions. 

 

If soaring oratories alone would do it, Indonesia under Sukarno would not have been the economic basket case that it was. Granted, Churchill galvanized the Brits during the relentless German bombings. However, what defeated the Nazis was precise planning and effective execution of D-Day.

 

Skipper Anwar should do more listening, less lecturing. Go below deck to search for and get rid of the loose nuts and rusty bolts that could sink the ship of state. Listening more and lecturing less might also prevent a mutiny.