A Doctor in The House: A Memoir of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad (58 page)

I sought to show that the same rules applied to everybody, even the Prime Minister. As citizens we all had to observe the same code, and follow the same regulations. In 1982, I removed the difference in time between East and West Malaysia. Before that, Sabah and Sarawak were ahead of Peninsular Malaysia by half an hour, putting them in the same time zone as Hong Kong and China. The internal time difference was inconvenient and it meant offices opened and closed at different times in different Malaysian cities and towns. Besides, the world was now generally divided into hourly time zones; very few half-hour zones remained and adjusting the time when traveling was often confusing.

I remember telling Lee Kuan Yew about this when I visited Singapore. The Japanese produce world clocks with time zones for the principal cities, and it is easier to use these clocks if the difference between home time and local time is one hour. Many people think time is fixed by God and cannot be changed. Day and night are determined by God, but giving time to it is a human invention. During British rule, 7am in the Malaya was signalled by one strike of the gong because it was 1am in England. During the Japanese Occupation, Tokyo time, which was two hours ahead of Malaysian time, was used. Among other things, this forced the amusement parks to close very early.

Some regions like the Caribbean have only one time zone and a great distance between its eastern and western areas. As a result, mornings are very bright in the east while it is still very dark in the west. And Jakarta, despite being well to the east of Kuala Lumpur, lags behind us in time. There, the mornings are very bright but dusk begins around 5pm. Russia, which stretches for thousands of kilometers east to west, maintains five to seven different internal time zones. Official communication between Moscow and the Russian Far East cannot be easy since working hours vary so greatly.

Standardising time between the eastern and western parts of Malaysia has given us very important benefits. It has meant that many of us in the Peninsula must get up and go to the office just after sunrise, but we have more time in the evening for sports and recreation. Most importantly, standardisation gave all Malaysians, in the east and on the peninsula, the feeling that we really do belong to the same country. And since we adopted Sabah/Sarawak time, they did not have to change and were given no cause to believe that peninsular requirements were being imposed upon them. All of Malaysia, not just Sarawak and Sabah, now share the same time zone as the major commercial and political centres of East Asia.

Though I succeeded in streamlining time, in my years as Prime Minister I was unable to establish a standard Malaysian weekend. Since the time of the British the non-Federated Malay states had their weekends on Friday. This, I think, was a reaction to the introduction of Sunday as a rest day in the colonies of Penang, Malacca and Singapore and the four Federated Malay States. The British, being Christians, would go to church on Sundays. The Malay Sultans naturally assumed that a weekend should be a holy day, a day for prayers. Since Muslims have their congregational prayers on Friday, they chose Friday as their weekend and Thursday replaced Saturday when work stopped at midday.

Among Christians, Sunday is regarded as the Sabbath when strict believers are not allowed to work or play, but most Christians may just ignore this religious injunction. The Jews regard Saturday as their Sabbath and they too are not supposed to work. But today Sunday is just a day off, the work-free weekend. It no longer has any religious significance or connotation, so many non-Christian countries also adopt the Sunday weekend without problem. Malaysians, too, generally regard Sunday as part of the weekend without religious associations. When independent Malaya decided to retain the Sunday weekend, the five former unfederated states retained Friday as their day off. Where Sunday is the weekend, Muslims are given time off to go for Friday prayers.

The Quran is very clear that Friday is not the Muslim Sabbath as after the congregational Friday prayers, they should go about their work. Unlike Jews and Christians, they are not forbidden to work. If they do not have a work-free day on Friday, it is not a sin. Choosing Friday as a day of rest was a decision made by people who wanted to emphasise the difference between Islam and Christianity. I prefer the Sunday weekend because working when nobody else is in their office in the rest of today’s globalised world is inconvenient and unproductive, a definite disadvantage. It would be far better to conform to world standard practice.

Eventually, towards the end of my term in office, Johor and then Perlis decided to make Sunday their weekend. But Kedah, Kelantan and Terengganu still refuse to fall in line.

Everybody, from the Prime Minister to the ordinary citizen, should do their jobs as best they can and not primarily for monetary consideration. We all need to contribute to developing the right attitudes and work ethic that can sustain a successful nation. To see the results of your work taking shape is far more rewarding than any financial compensation. There are those who may not care much for the development that took place during my stewardship. Still, it gives me intense satisfaction to see Kuala Lumpur grow, to see the majestic Twin Towers, the well-planned administrative capital of Putrajaya, the North-South Expressway, the electrified double-track trains, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport, the city’s Light Rail Transit, the development of our beautiful holiday island of Langkawi, and much more.

Before the Japanese invasion of Malaya, we had all believed that Westerners were superior, cleverer and all-powerful, which conversely meant that we believed all non-whites, including Asiatics (the word “Asians” was not used in those days), were somehow inferior.

My early travels to Japan, however, convinced me that Malays and Malaysians could learn a great deal from that part of the world. By the time I became Prime Minister, Japan had become a great industrial power and South Korea was emerging as an industrialising country. It did not take long for me to decide that Malaysia should look to these countries as models of national development, and this was how the Look East Policy was formulated and launched.

I was mystified by the initial reaction to the policy, which was negative. Malaysians, including civil servants, suggested that it was ridiculous to model ourselves after Japan. They believed it made more sense to look at Europe, which was far more developed. Was it not more logical, they said, to go straight to the source rather than indirectly through the countries which had learnt from Europe?

But what they forgot was that Europe had over 200 years of slow development. The Japanese had only just become industrialised and the problems and hardships they had faced and overcome were still fresh in their memory. I did not completely disregard the West’s experiences and many contributions—they still had a lot to teach us, but it is always better to learn from people with recent experience. While there was not a single living European who remembered the Industrial Revolution, there were any number of Japanese and Koreans who still recalled vividly how hard and costly it had been for them to acquire Western industrial know-how and to manage industrial plants.

Even in the 1980s, many people still did not think much of Asians. Most Europeans still held a very superior attitude. They were always talking down to us and insinuating that our ways were primitive and therefore wrong. When I introduced the Look East Policy, many people believed it was connected to our Buy British Last policy,
[1]
 but that was quite another matter and the two had distinctly different objectives. As for the Look East Policy, it simply seemed more logical to look at Asian countries which were doing well. Its rationale had nothing to do with my not being trained and educated in England. Had I been educated in England and then visited Japan, I imagine I would have been even less inclined to look to the West for ideas about our own industrialisation.
 

When I visited England in 1962, one year after my trip to Japan, the British were still very undecided about joining the European Economic Community, the predecessor to the European Union. British workers were perpetually on strike at that time and productivity was very low. There was less reconstruction going on in London than in Japan and some of the areas that had been bombed during World War II had still not been cleared. Britain did not look at all as if it was rebuilding itself, certainly not the way Japan was.

On that trip, I was invited to the house of Sir Richard Winstedt, a highly regarded Malayan Civil Service officer, who had looked after my sister-in-law Saleha when she was studying in England. Winstedt had written a number of books about Malaya and Malay culture. I met his nephew over lunch and remarked that British workers seemed lazy and were always asking for less work and more pay. I said that there was no way they could compete with workers in other countries, especially in Japan. I had a strong feeling that he did not like what I said.

I do not have anything against workers and their unions, but reason tells me that more pay and less work reduces productivity and competitiveness. The Japanese on the other hand, worked very hard. Even their protests, or strikes, were held 
after
 working hours. It may seem funny, bordering even on the ludicrous, but there is a very sound logic beneath it. If it is done in their own time, workers will strike only over genuine issues which they feel strongly about. They will not go on strike over frivolous issues to see if some unwarranted advantage may be achieved.

If no work is done, no money is made. And if no money is made, claims and petitions for increased pay cannot be met. I concluded very early on that it was their work ethics—their intense dedication to their work—that enabled the Japanese to recover from the war so quickly. For that reason the principal aim of the Look East Policy was to emulate how the Japanese worked. In his book 
Made in Japan
, Akio Morita, the founder of Sony Corporation, recalls the founding of Sony and how, in the immediate postwar years, Japanese workers were willing to work for just a ball of rice with some soya sauce. The West would call this exploitation but the Japanese workers knew that Japan was poor and that it had to rebuild its industries. They were working not for individual gain, but for the country, and they understood that lifting the country from its depths would eventually result in better lives for them. Sacrifices had to be made, and they were made without complaint. The country did well and today Japanese workers are among the highest paid in Asia.

The Japanese system of employment was completely different from the European and also the Malaysian systems. They provided lifetime employment for their workers. When companies get into trouble in Europe or the US, one of the first steps taken is retrenchment, now euphemistically referred to as “downsizing”. Dismissed workers then register themselves as unemployed and may then collect dole from the Government.

This makes scant economic sense. Dole payments in some European countries are ridiculously high. Upon dismissal a worker may be paid up to 90 per cent of his last drawn pay, so the more highly paid the employee, the larger the dole payment. Obviously, one can live quite comfortably on 90 per cent of one’s previous pay and this fact inevitably leads to abuse of the unemployment relief system. People may simply choose to remain unemployed, imposing great strain upon government funds. The dole neither encourages workers to seek an early return to work in a different job nor encourage investment in new enterprises. It simply forces up the cost of labour to all employees and is a powerful disincentive to economic growth and development.

The dole system (that is, unemployment benefits) depends on the revenue received by the Government. When the economy is doing well, revenue is higher and the need to pay dole is less because unemployment levels are lower. But when the economy experiences a downturn and Government revenue falls, that is when more workers will be unemployed and dole payments will increase. In a recession, when revenues diminish greatly, dole payments will increase so much that they become a big strain on the Government at a time when it needs to spend more to help the economy recover. The dole is not really a good system.

When Japanese companies were not doing well, they did not sack workers, choosing instead to redeploy or create work for them. The Japanese devised a variety of measures to retain their workers. The workers received these benefits in return for their loyalty to the company, while the company, assured of the commitment of its hard-working employees, could plan, recover and prosper. Unfortunately today, Japanese workers are no longer loyal to their companies. They no longer want lifetime employment, and prefer to hop from job to job.

Admirable though lifetime employment was, I did not think that Malaysia could afford this same system. We have no dole for the unemployed, and they usually have to depend on their families to sustain them. This makes them uncomfortable, so they would make an effort to find jobs. The Government on its part tries to create as many jobs as possible. Creating jobs, especially by implementing policies that encourage the creation of private sector work opportunities, is the proper role of government. That was why when Malaysia invited foreign investment, we did not insist on immediately collecting taxes. We were prepared to forgo taxes if the investors created jobs for our people. In our view, no one who was prepared to work should remain unemployed. In fact, the Government was so successful in creating jobs that there are now more than two million foreign workers in the country. We cannot ourselves meet the demand for labour that our economic development has generated.

Before the war, there were a number of Japanese shops in Malaysia that specialised in selling cheaply-priced Japanese products. One was a good quality pencil sharpener, which I bought when I was about seven years old. At the time I assumed that it had been made by Europeans, probably the British, but when I turned it over I saw “Made in Japan” engraved on the blade and I was surprised that an Asian country could produce such goods. In those days Japanese products had a bad image because they were generally of poor quality. The British wanted to perpetuate that stigma so it became British policy for Japanese goods to be marked with “Made in Japan” to discourage sales.