Recently I had the opportunity to fly between KL and Brunei on Air Asia and between KL and Singapore on Tiger Airways. Imagine my return flight to Singapore from KL cost only S$27 all inclusive. It would cost more for my daughter and I to take a cab from KL to KLIA than for the flight itself. Although evident for sometime, may I say once more that air travel has experienced the quantum transformation that cars went through 30 years ago and mobile phones 15 years ago. As Air Asia says, "now everybody can fly".
Air Asia is clearly the major player that it deserved to be. One look at the KLIA budget terminal would suggest their domination of the sector accounting for more than 80% of flights. Interestingly, some of the flights technically belong to different entities like Air Asia Thailand or Air Asia Indonesia or the long haul Air Asia X, but they seem seamless in terms of branding and operations, flying people in-and-out of the KL hub to dozens of regional cities. I see them as a true Malaysian success story founded on creativity and actually adding-value.
The other transformation as far as I can see, especially in the Klang Valley, is the massive outbreak of tolled highways, which has spread like tentacles from a poison ivy to colonise existing public roads, cutting through remorselessly through whole neighbourhoods (the dicing-up of Pudu and Cheras comes to mind) and reaching through hitherto forested (for now) valleys to double-up on other existing highways. In my mind, they are no longer about infrastructure or connecting places or even good planning. I just feel they merely smack of greed where the logic seems to be for the well-connected to each find a way to sneak in their own highway so as to block off a slice of revenue or opening up opportunities to develop plantation/state-land for their own benefit.
Enough to say I was troubled by many of the things I saw in Malaysia.
In the smaller towns, prices and the standard of living are still low. Families still subsist on wages of a few hundred ringgit. Migrant labourers are brought in for less than RM500 - which is a lower wage than one find in many parts of China. Since when Malaysia want to - or rather need to - compete with China on labour costs? But migrant labour are increasingly a fact of life, that is increasingly keeping wages and quality of the workforce low, even when they are being suspected (rightly or - more likely, wrongly) for anything from increased crime, social problems to racial provocations. Even then a considerable portion of what pass for wages for foreign workers actually go to "agents" or the legal holder of their employment passes who tend to be handed about to division chiefs and other local politicians.In the smaller towns, I had the feeling that they are slowly being abandoned by the world which is leaving them by. It used to be that smaller towns used to have a respectable core of middle class - successful planters, enterpreneurs, lawyers, doctors, educators - who form the heart and soul of the community. Nowadays, those who are left are well past their prime, retirees who has seen their children left for the brighter lights of KL, Singapore and any number of places beyond.
Among those who remain, the education level, career prospects and sources of legitimate income just seem to be stagnant or fallen. I just feel in smaller towns, the middle class has been hollowed out by migration, mal-distributions of wealth and opportunity and a type of inflation that is uniquely targeted at carving out the quality of life for middle-class Malaysians.
For example: Food and drink at the hawker centers typically go for RM3 and RM1 or less respectively. Single storey houses and stuff you find in the village shops are cheap although the quality is awful. On the otherhand, once you get beyond the "village-basics", anything more sophisticated (clothes, shampoos, consumer products, appliances etc.) and some services (restaurants etc) are more highly priced than even in the developed countries. I am sure for some products, import tax and duties may be to blame. But in most cases I was not talking about luxury products.
This phenomenon of illogically high prices for consumer goods and luxuries is even more pronounced once one gets to KL. The vast disparity suggested to me that there is a huge gulf between the ordinary people and a very small minority of the super wealthy. If there is one thing that seem amiss in Malaysia today, it would be that the system is engineered to feather the nest of the elite and at the cost of those who are trying to remain in the middle class. When one consider how much it would cost to live comfortably as a Malaysian urban middle class i.e., the costs and availability of property*, the car + toll, education, consumer items, eating out, satellite TV, communications, personal safety, etc. there just seem to be a considerable and deliberate range of financial burden - caused by a combination of taxes/duties, corporate collusion, corrupt money making schemes, or simply failures of public policy - just at that point when one try to make it from hardship to a comfortable life. May be there is nothing to be made from the poor, but unless Malaysia takes better care of its middle class, it can never make the next step to being a developed country.
And there is another observation that troubled me. I went to a few book shops and I began to see a growing segment of Malay books of all types - anything from romance novels, to fantasy stories set in the time of the Prophet, to personal development books written by this Ustaz and the other. While I was amazed at the growth of the world of Malay publishing, I was also getting concerned at the insularity of the world view of someone who only has access to those books. Usually just around the next corner, I could see a similar phenomenon of large numbers of interesting books in Chinese that originate from China. They appeal to different target audiences but the effects are the same: a world view that is limited and may not be very enlightened or relevant to a multi-cultural country. I wonder what society would be like if different segments read only their own books and newspapers, listen to their own music, watch their own TV channels and talk only to people within their own groups.
On that slightly dismal note, I move next to Singapore....
1 comment:
Reading your piece on Malaysia on her 53rd Merdeka day does confirm my view that the country has regressed in more than one way.
A good place to observe if the middle/professional class still thrive in the smaller town will be visiting the local Rotary/Lion Club.
I have lost touch with the Rotary for almost 20 years. I still recall my patron Rotarians were generous and helpful to the community helping us to organize charity night at the local cinema to raise fund for the old folks and orphanage.
Their composition, their professional background, their activities could reveal a lot of the community. They tended to be secular, english speaking and the elite of the local community without political string.
Maybe with the increasingly polarized malaysia in the past years, the ideal of a malaysia has given ways to malaysaja - witfully coined by none other than Anwar Ibrahim's daughter - Nurul Izzah Anwar.
I am convinced that communal politics is the root of the Malaysia's problem.
I agree with your diagnosis that a country whose peoples are divided by divergent world views is bad for integraton and unity. This point is taken up by the ultra to demand the abolition of non-Malay school and etc. Nor would the 40% non-Malay inter-marries with the malay and be assimilated to Malay alone. It may happen like in some inter-ethnic families in Brunei or elsewhere but it won't be the mainstream.
The critical issue confronting Malaysia today is to rebuild the consensus of what holds malaysia together. malay community in particular is divided on this point.
Short of that, malaysia will only keep on falling in every social economic rankings.
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