Dr M How will history judge Dr. M? I don’t know. We will be dead by then. My only close encounter with Dr M was in 1976 when he came to my school in Sg Petani for some meeting. He was then a Deputy Prime Minister and also Minister of International Trade. Tun Razak, before he passed away, brought back Dr M from political wilderness (after being banished for sometime by Tunku). I was talking to a friend just now about Dr M. He said, (as a matter of fact): who did Dr M did not have a misunderstanding with? First, he had a fight with Tunku, then Hussein Onn, Musa Hitam, Tengku Razaleigh and of course, Anwar Ibrahim. Tun Razak? Well, he passed away so suddenly, at such an early age, tak sempat mau gadoh. Those are the ones we are made aware of. What about the others we don’t know about? We were also discussing about the country’s obvious lack of capable younger generations of leaders. Dr. M ruled the country for 22 years. He took the country from just being the backwater of Singapore to what we are today. I remember when I was visiting Italy’s country side a couple of years ago, an elderly man gestured to me (in Italian) where was I from? I answered: ‘Malaysia’ The elderly man went: Oohh..Petronas Twin Tower! I was pleasantly surprise, now, even orang kampong Italy knows where Malaysia is. For a long time, during those 22 years, we were in a comfort zone that we overlooked the need to groom new, so called second generation leaders. To make matter worse, some people tend to interpret younger generation’s eagerness to voice their own ideas as anti establishment sentiments. Out of frustrations, these bright young professionals refused to work with government of the day. For example, PAS in the sixties were known as Parti Ustaz or Parti Kampong. However, by the eighties, more and more professionals were joining them. My 20 year old daughter once said, political affiliation of a leader is not a criteria she look at, instead, she look at such qualities as being smart, capable of making good decision for the country, ‘clean’, and has that ‘wow’ factor. This view, I think, represents the general view of youth today. This is infact the basic difference between the older generations versus the younger ones. The older generations tend to be nostalgic; giving much weight on historical facts, the main one being May 13, on how difficult life was those days, and that we should be thankful to what we have today. When I told my daughter that I had 5 sen pocket money to school (sometimes none), she would say, oh please abah, don’t repeat the story. The younger generation’s rear view mirror has a short view. They are less interested in what happened yesterday, but more interested in what is the future for them. I tried to argue with her that in order to go forward, one need to understand the history. She would not buy my argument. I need not elaborate on coffee shop talks; people are worried on a lot of issues. While some people praise Dr M and his generation of leaders for what they did to the country, there are also growing number of people saying that those early leaders we had, failed to groom new set of leaders to take over the country. How will history judge Dr M? Only time will tell. Selamat menyambut hari merdeka. Happy Reading. Rahim Zainun (22/08/2014)
Posted on: Fri, 22 Aug 2014 15:38:28 +0000
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