A Doctor in The House: A Memoir of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad (77 page)

In my understanding the availability of good administrators, doctors, engineers, soldiers and leaders will absolve the Muslim community of many sins. These people are actually fulfilling the injunctions of Islam.

Whereas prayers, fasting, the giving of alms and performing the Haj give merit to the individual, the provision for the needs of the Muslim community earns merit not just for the individual but also absolves the community of common sins.

Unfortunately, Muslims and their religious teachers stress more on 
fardhu `ain
 the performance of prayers, fasting, alms-giving and the Haj, than on 
fardhu kifayah
. Yet nowhere in the Quran or the true Hadith is it said that “
fardhu `ain
” which earns merit only for oneself is more important in the afterlife than 
fardhu kifayah
.

Muslims know very well that soldiers who die in the defence of Islam or the Islamic community are regarded as martyrs (
shahid
) and are promised places in heaven. If this is so then those involved in providing for the defence and well-being of the community must be regarded as earning as much merit for the afterlife as those who perform the various rituals and who study the religion, lead prayers and recite the Quran.

The territorial defence of the community is not done just by soldiers but by those who work in the defence industry, by researchers, developers and producers of weapons of defence; by the whole administration, in fact. Provided that they all do their work sincerely and properly, then they must be considered as performing 
fardhu kifayah
 and are deserving of the same merit.

Of course if they fail in their duty, if they are corrupt, then they would be committing grave sins and deserve punishment in the afterlife.

My study of the Quran has been extremely useful in providing guidance in my personal life and in carrying out the tasks entrusted to me as leader of my country, and I felt that others too should benefit from it. If the whole of Malaysia is peopled by the “rightly guided”, then Malaysia must become a great country. It would help banish the general belief that Muslim countries cannot become developed the way non-Muslim countries can. Perhaps there is an element of ego but that does not detract from the fact that their work makes Islam a respected and strong religion.

When I decided to give more meaning to the constitutional provision that Islam is the official religion, I did not mean that all the different peoples of Malaysia must become Muslim. All we wanted was that Islamic values be imbibed by Malaysians without the need for them to even believe in Islam. And so it was that in my second year as Prime Minister I declared that the Malaysian Government would be guided by Islamic values.

There may be differences in the value systems of those of different faiths in Malaysia, but I did not think that the differences would be that great or that many. By and large good Islamic values are the same as those that are regarded as good Western values or the so-called Universal values. If they seem to be different it is not due to the teachings of Islam, but rather to the interpretations made by those who feel a need to be different. There are of course certain Western values which are incompatible with Islam, especially those which have evolved in modern times. But even non-Muslims in Malaysia would want to reject these values.

Even as a young boy I had felt unable to understand why Muslim countries seemed backward and weak by comparison to the countries of the West. It cannot be because of the teachings of Islam; the true teachings as found in the Quran and not as interpreted by some religiously learned people. The fact is that there was a time when the Muslim countries were more advanced than the West.

I read that the Muslim settlers in Andalusia in Spain were much more advanced in agriculture than the Europeans of that time. They built viaducts to carry water from the mountains to irrigate the land. They were skilled in construction as evidenced by the Alhambra in Grenada. They built roads for travellers and merchants. They had hotels for the merchants, complete with compounds for their camels and horses. They had markets for itinerant traders and permanent shopkeepers.

They sailed the high seas and crossed deserts guided by the stars. Arab merchants traversed the vast Indian Ocean to trade and exchange goods with Chinese and Indian traders at Southeast Asian entrepot ports.

Their towns and cities were well laid out and their mosques reflected their skills, their understanding of physics, and their appreciation of beauty. Their armies were well organised and powerful, as were their naval forces.

Everything pointed to the superiority of the Muslims and their civilisation. Yet they were still ardent Muslims, strictly adhering to their religious duties, and they were learned in their religion. Their scholars studied the religion deeply and wrote tomes on the various aspect of Islam even as they excelled in the sciences, in mathematics, in astronomy and in medicine.

The world at that time respected Islam and the Muslims. They did so because of the success of Muslims in every field.

Being a successful country is not unIslamic. A country will be unIslamic only if it ignores the teachings of Islam. And the teachings of Islam say nothing about being failures in this world in order to gain merit in the next.

At the general meeting of a non-Muslim political party in 1996, I declared in a speech that Malaysia was an Islamic country. The non-Muslims did not object because they knew that since its founding the Muslim majority which dominated the Government had been fair and just to them. But there are some Muslims, even in Malaysia, who believe that the only thing that would qualify a country as a Muslim country is if we decapitate and chop off the hands of criminals.

But that is an arbitrary criterion. The Quran advocates an Islamic community and not an Islamic country. In the Quran it is not the punishment that is stressed. Indeed Muslims are enjoined to forgive and be merciful. In verse 45 of 
Surah Al-Maidah
 the Quran says that those who forego the right to exact retribution, will have their sins forgiven. Clearly Islam is merciful and forgiving. Above all, justice is what makes a community Islamic.

When socialism and communism were on the ascendancy, nationalisation became the byword. It was the standard recipe for national development—it was believed that if the state owned the means of production, all profits would go to it and not to middlemen or selfish private interests. The resulting wealth, undiminished by predatory businessmen, would then belong to the workers’ government and would be fairly and equally expended on every citizen. But that approach did not work for a number of reasons so the pendulum swung back, and the idea of privatisation or denationalisation began to be considered seriously once more.

Malaysia had a few state-owned businesses but none were doing well, so we began to think of running these businesses as private corporations. The main difference between private and state enterprise was the profit motive. Whereas the whole of the profits from nationalised businesses would go to the Government, in the private sector the profit after tax goes to the owners or shareholders, and also to the management and employees via their salaries and wages. With profits as their incentive the owners, workers and managers would work harder. The advocates of private initiative claimed that this was the way to advance the enterprise and achieve profitability.

There was really no model of privatisation at that time for Malaysia to copy and we had to devise our own methods. We were concerned with what would happen to the workers who were government employees. So to ensure that the workers did not lose because they were no longer on government pay and pension, we placed conditions on privatisation.

First, the employees should have the option to stay on a government salary scheme if they wished. Should the government scheme be revised upward, they would be entitled to the revised pay even though they were no longer government employees. But if they chose to be on the company’s pay scheme, they might enjoy the bonuses that are paid when a company does well. They would also enjoy any revision of pay by the company. However, once they decided which scheme they wanted to be under, they could not switch back. If they chose not to join the privatised entity at all, they would stay with the Government but would take on other jobs. They might also choose to leave altogether, in which case they would benefit from a voluntary separation scheme which would entitle them to a lump-sum payment. But they were not to be dismissed simply to reduce the privatised entity’s costs. Certain personnel, however, had to remain with the Government to do supervisory work.

We first decided to try out our privatisation model with the Telecoms Department. The department’s services were not efficient and it often took two years for applications for telephones to be approved. There was also evidence of corrupt practices. The Government had to allocate almost RM200 million yearly to run the department and that allocation kept increasing. The Government also earned practically nothing from operating the telephone and the telegraph services.

As a first step, the department was made into a corporation in 1987 called Syarikat Telekom Malaysia Berhad (STMB), Malaysia’s first privatised entity. Its assets, in installed capital equipment, were given a nominal value and transferred to the corporation. The estimated capital was divided into shares of RM1 and the company was listed to enable investors to take them up, although the Government retained 70 per cent of the shares. Officers from the department seconded to the company were no longer subject to Civil Service General Orders or rules in the conduct of their work.

Service improved almost immediately, earnings shot up and very soon the company was making about RM300 million a year. The Government not only profited from the dividends but also no longer had to pay the annual RM200 million allocation to the old Telecoms Department. Of course, the Government also saved on the wages and salaries which had been paid to Telecoms Department employees before.

New telecommunications technology was just taking off at the time and fax machines had made the telegraph obsolete. Under these circumstances, a government department would have taken years to decide what to do. The company, on the other hand, made a decision to install the fax machines quickly and allowed private ownership of the machines. Other innovations followed and the company responded rapidly. Today’s telecommunication businesses are among the most profitable money-earners, especially after wireless cellular phones became ever more versatile, popular and widely used. The telecoms company was able to cope with new challenges posed by the increasing versatility of wireless communications. Even when new private companies were licensed, the largely Government-owned STMB could hold its own in competition with them. Its share price rose and the performance of the company enabled it to borrow from the banks for expansion.

The use of land lines and copper wires has been reduced by wireless technology and even fibre optics are no longer as important now as they once were. The earnings of the telecoms company improved with each new technology and technical application. Adopting commercial practices, it promoted its services, something that a government department which monopolised service would never have done or even considered necessary. Privatisation resulted in better service, better pay for workers and new sources of income for the Government, where before the Government literally had to subsidise the service. The number of employees on government payroll was also reduced, with considerable savings.

The Government continued to act as the regulator and licensor, as new technologies had to be scrutinised before adoption to ensure they were not used for illegal purposes. When the colour printer was introduced, for example, some Ministers objected, fearing they might be used to make counterfeit currency notes. The Cabinet wanted to license the machines, but the usage would have been so great and diverse that licensing and control measures would only have hindered the adoption of this new technology. Despite the risk, it was decided to allow the machines to be imported and sold freely. After all, the machines could also counterfeit notes outside the country. Today colour pictures can be duplicated and then transmitted anywhere in the world within seconds and picture quality keeps improving. Whatever the abuses and criminal applications, the usefulness of the machines and the business they generate far outweigh the possibility of abuse. New advances in technology continue to give rise to new uses. Telecommunications companies must keep devising new applications quickly to increase their business and profits, and to maintain market share and survive. Unburdened by bureaucratic delays, they are able to respond quickly. As private companies they know and live by the truth that time costs money, and that delay can be fatal.

Government offices would not be able to cope with this challenge as people in different departments would want to have their say in the decision-making process. Delays would drag on. These would not cost those officers anything—a government officer apparently stood to gain nothing from the earnings that the decision might generate or sustain any loss from the delay in making decisions. It did not matter to them that the approved innovation might result in an increase in government revenue and promote the country’s development. Once absorbed into the Consolidated Account, where all government revenue was consolidated, the added profits would be practically untraceable. Other government priorities would likely have a stronger claim on the money. Civil servants who held any proposal’s fate in their own hands are not motivated as they have no personal interest or stake in reaching a good decision quickly.

Another reason that forced us to consider privatisation was that the public demand for utilities and services far exceeded our means to deliver them—specifically the Government’s financial and manpower capacities. Waiting for the Government to set aside the funds needed would always mean a delay in providing the necessary utilities and services. Inadequate services would impede the country’s economic growth and development and would also generate public discontent and anti-Government feelings.