Malaysia: The 120th State Most Likely To Fail

Fellow comrades,

Foreign Policy magazine and the Fund for Peace has released its annual Failed States Index for 2007. Malaysia has managed to rank 120th out of 177 states. Quite an achievement, I must say. The states were ranked based on 12 indicators comprising Social, Economic and Political aspects.

Our lowest score was 3.6/10 for "Chronic and Sustained Human Flight", meaning "Brain Drain" and voluntary emigration of the middle class. Being in Australia, and witnessing first hand the arrivals of these "Brains" and emigrants, I'd have to agree with this one. The are so many (ex) Malaysians who are living in Australia today, and more of them keep coming every year to study and apply for PR and settle down here after they graduate. This mindset is becoming the norm, rather than the exception among students.

Our highest score was 6.6/10 for "Uneven Economic Development along Group Lines". That's our highest score and we barely passed? Given that it means that we still have "group based inequality", "group based impoverishment" and "rise of communal nationalism based on real or perceived group inequalities", I'd say they were pretty lenient on marking us for this particular indicator. The "rise of communal nationalism" part is getting worryingly starker, particularly among young Malays. There seems to be a rise in the number of what I'd call neo-UltraMalays. They're pro-Malay, in the same style as Tun Mahathir was, but are different in their reasons for being so. Rather than supporting affirmative actions such as the New Economic Policy for the advantages that it gives to the Malays who were deprived of significant economic participation under the colonial masters, they're suppoting such policies because they believe Malaysia belongs to the Malays and as such government policies should benefit the Malays only. To say that these people are misguided would be an understatement. Probably a history lesson or two would help. I guess Tun Mahathir himself said it best: "Melayu Mudah Lupa".

Godspeed,
Fadli

You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too - John Kenneth Galbraith