To M’sia with love, from the world

We are in the spotlight as the global flavour of the month. Keeping that love is going to take a lot more hard work.

ON Oct 10, 2012, I wrote about how Psy’s global hit song brought much adoration and admiration for South Korea.

At that time, Malaysians, along with the rest of the world, were obsessed with his Gangnam Style. It was so popular that Barisan Nasional brought Psy in for a Chinese New Year celebration performance in Penang, just ahead of the May 5, 2013 general election.

That turned out to be an expensive PR disaster and didn’t improve BN’s GE13 fortunes in Penang.

It wasn’t Psy’s fault but I was struck by how South Koreans were lapping up the reflected glory from his megahit and left me longing for the same sense of enormous pride about being Malaysian.

My lack of pride then was caused by embarrassing stories that made us the laughing stock on the world stage; stories like having the worst taxi drivers and putting out what one website described as “hysterically stereotypical guidelines for parents looking to detect ‘homosexual symptoms’ in their children”.

Those antics, however, were nothing in comparison to the really humongous embarrassment called 1MDB that was yet to explode in our collective face. While there were questions raised about its financial dealings, the full extent of the scandal would only be exposed in 2015.

And so I wondered when would we have a “Gangnam Style moment”, when someone or something from Malaysia commanded global admiring attention?

We have it now, the person and the something. Since May 9, the world has been swooning over Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad and the spectacular rout of BN.

We can finally hold our heads up again and no longer bear the shame of being described by the US attorney general as the nation with the worst form of kleptocracy.

Sure, we had intermittent street protests but not on the scale of the South Koreans’ determination to remove their scandal-ridden president.

Of course, the South Koreans had the advantage of key institutions like their press, judiciary and police being relatively free and independent and a parliament that was sensitive to public dissent.

And yet, despite all the odds, Malaysians finally voted for change. For that, we can be justifiably proud and accept every bit of praise and accolade for being a shining example of people power from well-wishers from around the world.

Malaysians rejected BN because we believed it had become too arrogant and corrupt.

Indeed, the revelations from the police raids and press conferences that have transfixed the nation beat anything the writers of US TV series House of Cards – described as a “wicked political drama” featuring a ruthless, manipulative and pow- er-hungry president and First Lady in the White House – can dream up.

Yet we should be more circumspect because the juicy revelations are whipping up our emotions and making us very judgmental. It’s a given we want all the perpetrators responsible punished but the new government must sort out fact from fiction to build a solid case to bring the culprits to justice.

And as much as we want that and solutions to tackle the shocking amount of government debt, what is more important to me is for Pakatan Harapan to have concrete, sincere plans to build a new Malaysia.

Both Dr Mahathir and Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim came together with DAP and Amanah leaders with one aim in mind: remove Datuk Seri Najib Razak as prime minister by breaking Umno’s stranglehold on Malay voters.

Now that’s done, they must show they can stay together and offer us something much better. Our new government therefore must demonstrate to us by example that we can live, work, worship and play together without fear and suspicion of each other.

It must take the lead to dismantle our race-based politics, government and even our society’s fixation on looking at just about everything through race-coloured lenses.

That is imperative because we have seen how issues of race and religion were abused and misused to divide and rule us.

Which brings me to the great divide that exists post-GE14. While the peninsular West Coast states as well as Johor clearly voted for PH’s brand of politics to build a more racially united, progressive and inclusive nation, that was outright rejected in religiously conservative Kelantan and Terengganu.

PH and Rafizi Ramli’s Invoke got it completely wrong when they predicted PAS would be wiped out.

PH must set out to convince people in those two states that pluralism, secularism and liberalism – all of which were rejected by the previous government and labelled negatively as “human right-ism” – are not anathema to Islam.

Indeed, in PH states, the expectations are incredibly high and pressure to deliver rests heavily on 93-year-old shoulders.

Right now, there is so much love and gratitude for Dr Mahathir for saving Malaysia that there is an online campaign to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Actually, people have forgotten he has been nominated before: in 2007 by four non-governmental organisations in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

I know because I broke that story.

That nomination was spearheaded by Dr Ejup Ganic, the VicePresident of Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1990-96 and President of the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina until March 2001.

Dr Ganic had worked closely with Dr Mahathir in the 1990s when Malaysia provided economic, political and humanitarian support to a Bosnia-Herzegovina recovering from the trauma of genocide and ethnic cleansing in the 1992-95 civil war.

He felt Dr Mahathir deserved the Peace Prize as the Third World’s “most illustrious contemporary” and its “most courageous advocate”.

He also said Dr Mahathir had influenced the world by leaving behind lessons on how diversity could be managed, conflicts reconciled and multi-ethnicity harnessed to build a vibrant economic and political system.

Mark those words: managing diversity, reconciling conflict and building an economy and political system based on multi-ethnicity. These are exactly what this country needs now.

Our Prime Minister and his colleagues must now have the courage to apply those lessons on their own people to create a new Malaysia so that our present golden moment does not fade but continue to shine as a model multiracial nation for all the world to see and emulate.

Aunty is set to go a-travelling in the months to come and she will be proudly brandishing her Malaysian passport.