A FILIPINO official recently offered personal compliments to this writer over our “People Power” moment on May 9. “People Power” has, of course, long become synonymous with the event over a generation ago when street protesters brought down Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, the so-called “conjugal dictatorship” and respectively Philippine president and governor of Metro-Manila.
The similarities between Malaysia today and the Philippines of 1986 may be uncanny but not identical, naturally. The political denouement of Barisan Nasional (BN), when it actually occurred, was far less dramatic than what happened in the streets of Manila before the Marcoses were ejected and fled into exile.
Not a few Malaysians may also take umbrage over any political comparisons between their own country and the Philippines, with the latter’s unchanging image in the Malaysian popular imagination as decidedly a “Third World” nation compared to our own.
Still, there is no escaping the largely unsavoury comparisons of the two: today’s Malaysia and the Philippines of the mid-1980s. Especially with all the revelations of the raids on public finances to scarcely imaginable extents and the almost comic relief afforded by reports of fetishes for shoes then and handbags now.
As well, the public euphoria in the Philippines in the wake of the overthrow of the Marcoses and in Malaysia with the BN government’s downfall is almost identical.
That said, the trajectory the Philippines has traversed since 1986 is undoubtedly instructive for Malaysia and Malaysians. Already, Malaysians are displaying some impatience that more lasting changes they had expected with the first change in national government are not happening yet.
Filipinos, on the other hand, have by and large given up any more pretence of the high idealism attending their “People Power” revolution and have now elected as their president someone who harks back to what growing numbers want to believe was a “golden era” of at least the early Marcos years.
The minority that still clings stubbornly to the political ideal of a liberal and progressive Philippines cheered with news that Imelda has finally been convicted and may at last be heading for jail-time for some if not the numerous corruption cases hanging over her and her late husband. Never mind that the conviction took a ridiculously long time of over 40 years from when the crimes were first committed.
But Malaysia and Malaysians will perhaps always escape the many vicissitudes — both natural and man-made — that the rather luckless Philippines seem perpetually prone to.
We, as a nation, may be much less tolerant than the almost legendary and infinite forbearance of Filipinos of whatever challenges life throws at us. Our neighbours put up with a decade of martial law when much of the looting of public resources occurred.
Additionally, the Philippines largely frittered away the opportunities to institute root-and-branch reforms that a very unequal economy and the political system that buttressed it were and are very much in need of.
Similarly, Malaysia must guard against complacency, especially in the mistaken belief that our political system is in near-perfect working order simply because we managed to engineer a change in national government.
A more competitive political environment that we now possess has its ironical downsides — it seems to have a worrying propensity of exposing us to greater populist pressures.
A one-off (hopefully) “bail-out” extended by Petronas has managed to save us from some painful budgetary belt-tightening, but it does not solve the fundamental problem we have of trying to foreswear some public-revenue streams while at the same time adding to budgetary pressures with subsidies and handouts.
Thankfully, some people in the corridors of power in Putrajaya seem lately to be realising that it may be nigh impossible to square such a circle. Something will have to give, obviously.
Another redeeming attribute which may serve us in good stead is the fact that ours is a very open economy. It should make us more susceptible to the discipline that the market can inflict on the country and therefore limit the appetite of our leaders for politically friendly measures which the market will react less kindly to.
Perhaps the most useful lesson we can learn from the Philippine example is that however great a political morality play (and the “People Power” qualifies), the popular energy so generated sooner or later dissipates and there is just no escaping the hard slog that true nation-building entails. We ignore such a lesson at our own peril.
John Teo views developments in the nation, the region and the wider world from his vantage point in Kuching, Sarawak. He can be reached via johnteo808@gmail.com