Last week I chose to go alone to watch the movie ‘ White House Down ’. I liked the movie because of the simple moral and human dimensions highlighted within the film. It was rated P13 in Malaysia, which means it is suitable for the whole family. Wish I could have taken my whole family.

In fact it is so clean or simple a movie that I could not even figure out why the ‘hero’s wife and the sub-hero’s mother and father’ did not even have basic communication within a context of some kind of positive family kind of love.

Be that as it may… it was still a very feel good movie. Not only does good reign over evil, but the heroes appear to be very ordinary people. Moreover, by the end of the movie, the president of USA appears to achieve his ‘Middle East peace agenda’. What can be a better movie storyline to compete with Bollywood or Chinese movies.

Miti down over the TPPA?

Last week also I happened to see a NST “almost editorial centre-page piece” on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) written by none other than former prime minister of Malaysia… often regarded as a statesman prime minister. We (at the National IT Council executive directorate) worked closely with Dr Mahathir Mohamad from about 1996-2003. Therefore, while I do not know him personally, I know the quality of work he is capable of doing.

Before my final years of my Pegawai Tadbir Diplomatik (PTD) Service on secondment with Mimos Berhad, I had served in the International Trade and Industry Ministry (Miti) for almost five full years.

Some of our greatest achievements were the setting up of Matrade and SME Corporation, the IMP2, Domestics Investments Initiative, tripling the technical manpower supplier training, and the many Investment Guarantee Agreements which we signed with many countries as part and parcel of our promotion of Foreign Direct Investments, even without doing any ‘lawatan sambil belajar ’. The minister forbade such visits and we did all by email communication.

My personal highlights were the IMP2 which we called the Manufacturing Plus Plus strategy and the phasing out of the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) based on the Montreal Protocol. In the first, we radically changed the approach and strategies of investment promotion by recognising the reality of the ‘organic view of the world of trade and investments’. The second was a pro-environment strategy.

Therefore in the IMP2, we moved from the earlier emphasis on 13 investment industry sectors towards creating economic value through more natural and organic investment clusters. We made the argument that within our competitive industrial clusters, we had to move up the value chain by promoting value creation which involved more value added by Malaysian SMEs of suppliers and domestic business clusters with investment partners.

Of course ideally this would lead to the creation of Malaysian brands and Malaysian-owned IP or patentable products. That was true value creation and value addition.

Therefore, my move to Mimos Berhad, as executive director of the NITC, was a natural shift towards continuing the above knowledge economy argument through what we then called ‘information-intensive and knowledge driven clusters’.

The IMP2 argued for moving up the value chains towards both R&D and distribution and marketing for clusters wherein Malaysia needed to be competitive without also excluding our the resource-based industries. Only our policy-based industries faced some real challenges of market-based competition, and therefore our subsidies needed to be protect with some limits to ensure that the cost of Malaysian industries are not compromised.

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One of my greatest supporters was Tengku Mahaleel Tengku Ariff ( left ), the then-CEO of Proton because he was among the few who studied and absorbed the full contents of the IMP2.  Nevertheless, MITI’s greatest failure in implementing the IMP2 was the leadership failure of the Master Plan Steering Committee.

We failed in steering Malaysian traders and industrialists to move up the value chain in terms of open market competitiveness. Malaysia is too small a nation-state to speak like China or India or Indonesia in terms either or our market size or market demand. That was why even the 80 million population thesis was an equally stupid and impossible idea because try as we may (and I do have the requisite five children) the maths and stats did not allow for 80 million by 2020.

Premised on all of the above, I find it untenable, that the man who promoted and abused us in the direction of accelerated investments and heavy industries can now talk as if he cannot understand why the TPPA can be truly beneficial for Malaysia, even if we do not compromise on some of our primary policy requisites.

I also protest because the international trade and industry minister is left high and dry by all those of us who do understand that Malaysia has real no options but to move forward by being more open and more competitive. Federation of Malaysian Manufacturers (FMM) president Yong Poh Kon made this argument, but the NST failed to carry his views, but instead ‘plays politics’ with highlighting only Mahathir’s objections. Why so?

Mahathir has no credibility or integrity to now protest about newer free trade agreements for Malaysia which gives us competitive advantages vis-a-vis foreign competitors, and especially those which provide many subsidies for their local manufacturers. I think Mahathir’s greatest personal failure was that he did not have the diplomatic skills or competence to move our East Asia Economic Caucus (EAEC) agenda forward and see it realised.  

Instead he sat and oversaw the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) Summit being hosted in Malaysia and we even heard from the then-American vice-president who abused us at the dinner hosted in his honour. The late Noordin Sopiee even took a personal one-page advertisement to distance himself from the American vice-president’s views and positions.  

Enough was therefore said and done but Mahathir now needs to be honest and admit that his blind rejection of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) recommendation were the wrong ways to go, but we failed to listen and have since put all the blame on the World Bank and IMF and instead flown our own flag about the freeze on currency trading as the only way forward.  

Were not the real reasons that we were involved in currency trading and risk-taking and much of the losses which we pay for until today? Both Thailand South Korea followed the World Bank and IMF’s suggestions but they did not fare too badly.

Today, I see Mahathir doing the same, but by abusing the subject through their Umno AGM framework to create waves within the party by developing his counter-arguments which cannot stand against those who know, but he only appeals to those who do not know.

Therefore, I call upon NST to please stop playing politics with our economy.

Nevertheless, I propose one way forward. Our NGO, MiDAS@universities, is willing to organise a debate between Mustapa Mohamed and Dr Mahathir Mohamad over the TPPA and we can even try and get former minister Rafidah Aziz to moderate the dialogue. We can invite about four or five of our best economists to ask the two of them all the important and relevant questions.

Both can have about 20 minutes to make the case for and against.  Let Malaysians then decide whether TPPA is good or bad for Malaysia.

White House saved by ordinary citizens!

Hollywood drama is more believable for me; never Bollywood drama. In the above movie ‘the real crooks and bad guys were all were part and parcel of the mainstream’. The good guys were the ordinary citizens, even if with a simple and idealistic framework.

I fully identified with the ordinary hero’s of the movie and less so with the ‘administrative politicians of expediency’, whose primary values were their egos and their sense of victory of their personal or private agendas.

Malaysians can learn from watching this movie and applying it to the TPPA issue. We need to know who the real crooks and the real good guys are in life. The movie fits us like a tee. May God Bless Malaysia.