LETTER | Reading about Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim reminding the corrupt and powerful in the country that his room in Sungai Buloh Prison is still vacant has reminded me of something.
You see, I have a peculiar way of looking at Anwar. In my eyes, he has nothing to do with the present or the future. Whatever problem we have in the present, he is not going to solve it, and whatever direction we need for the future, he is not going to set it.
The only thing Anwar is good for is to help us deal with our past. We have a burdensome past and we need Anwar to help us unshackle ourselves from it so that it will stop weighing us down and cause us to sink into a never-ending abyss of decline and deterioration.
We don’t yet know how we are going to settle our problems in the present or navigate the future, but the one thing that we do know for sure is that we cannot do it while being shackled to an out-of-control and self-absorbed past.
In other words, we have to deal with our past first, before we can focus on the present and the future.
A good past is one that had its time in the sun and prepared the grounds for the future to rise. A bad past is one that is still clinging to life even after its world ceases to exist and its time has passed, and by clinging to life, it suffocates the present and threatens to kill the future even before the future even has a chance.
We currently have a bad past. We have a bad past because past leaders refused to ride into the sunset, although they already had their time in the sun and although their time and world had passed.
I will even go so far as to accuse our previous generation of leaders of being so self-absorbed and out of control, that they are willing to cause the ship called Malaysia to sink so they can remain captain of the ship.
They would, in other words, rather drown as the captain of a sinking ship, than be a part of a smooth sailing ship where they are not the captain.
Different leaders required
The fact of the matter is that the nation requires different sorts of leadership at different times.
When the nation is just born, it requires one sort of leadership, when it is developing, it requires another sort, when it is booming, it needs another sort, and when it is declining, it needs another sort.
That we still have geriatric leaders who are past their expiry date, telling us we should be charging ahead at full speed as if our country is still booming, at a time when our country might actually be facing a situation where we are better off retreating, is not only delusional, it is dangerous.
A leader who commands his soldiers to charge even when they are almost certainly going to be annihilated, rather than retreat, regroup, and reorganise to fight another day, is not brave and daring. He is a self-absorbed and out-of-control individual.
They can talk until their mouth foams about how they only wish to serve their country and people, but their actions will clearly tell you the only thing they ever truly serve is themselves.
Not only do they serve themselves, they likely view themselves as being somewhat more special or superior to others, and to protect this irrational and delusional view of themselves, they will destroy not just themselves, but everyone else in the process.
It is to ensure that we have leadership that is suitable for our times and prevent nutcases who delusionally believe they are special and superior to run the country, which is why we practise democracy.
Power to elect leaders
Democracy follows the idea that the wisest ones who can determine who is best fit to run the country are the people themselves.
The people are the ones you can always trust to decide on what is best for the country because the people are the ones whose feet are always firmly planted on the ground.
The “atas” people can afford to live in their head – those of us with too much money, too high a position, and too indulgent in pleasures, often do – but the people, who actually have to carry the weight of the world, do not have the luxury to indulge in excesses.
We have to always keep things real, and because we are the ones who always have to keep things real, it is we, as a collective, that are best able to decide on who amongst us is most fit to decide the future of the country.
Currently, the primary problem in our country is that the power to decide the future of the country has been taken away from the people.
The power to decide the future of the country has been taken away from us because we put too much trust in the previous generation of leaders, to the point that we allowed them to assume extraordinary wealth and power, and they are using their entrenched power and wealth to divide us further.
There is a reason why we allowed the previous generation of leaders to assume extraordinary wealth and power – the booming economy we experienced in the 1980s and 90s required power and wealth to be centralised in the hands of a capable leader for its benefits to be fully reaped, and so we centralised it in the hands of leaders like Dr Mahathir Mohamad.
But when the boom period ended around the time the new millennium approached, we increasingly found ourselves stuck with the past leadership, who are not refusing to let go of the power and wealth that we centralised in their hands, but are using the power, position, and wealth they have in their possession to relentlessly pressure our racial and religious fault lines, to divide us in such a way that we are unable to collectively apply our wisdom and choose leadership that is fit for our times and circumstances.
This is where Anwar, in my view, Anwar comes in.
The ancien régime
Anwar is a part of the previous generation of leaders who are used to having the power and wealth of the nation centralised in their hands.
After a power struggle in the late 90s however, he has broken ranks with the past generation of leaders.
Despite being humiliated and almost destroyed by the power struggle, he made an astounding comeback and became the prime minister 25 years after he was unceremoniously fired as the deputy prime minister.
In the last odd year since he has ruled, we can see Anwar intends to rule the country in the same way the country was ruled in the 80s and 90s by such people as Mahathir, although the circumstances today are far different from how it was then.
We have to bear with it however, because we need a leader with the mentality of the ancien régime to fight against the rest of the ancien régime and their acolytes so they no longer suffocate us in the present and destroy our future.
In the same way that we need a thorn to remove a thorn, or use fire to fight with fire, we need an Anwar to free our political and economic system from the debilitating shackles of the ancien régime.
As long as the ancien régime and their acolytes dominate our political and economic landscape, we will never be able to seize the day and secure the future.
We know Anwar’s humiliation and suffering at the hands of the ancien régime will almost certainly persuade him to hunt them down one by one.
That is what we need because the ancien régime and their acolytes who dominate our economic and political landscapes are clearly ruining us and causing us to spiral into a decline and deterioration.
But we also have to be careful not to make the mistake of affording Anwar too much power to go after them either.
Whatever it is, let us not forget that he is also a part of the ancien régime. As much as the ancien régime uses the power and wealth in their possession to divide the nation and secure their position, Anwar is also capable of doing it if we give him too much power to deal with our irksome past.
Anwar, we must remember, is here only to stop our decline, he is not going to be a part of our revival.
If we forget this, then the solution we assumed would solve our problem, might become an even bigger problem than our original problem, and cause us to spiral down to an abyss so deep and dark, that we can forget about revival in this lifetime.
The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.
