Mandela is a victim of racial discrimination.
Mandela is a victim of suppression of freedom.
Zambry’s party is a proponent of racial discrimination.
Zambry’s party is a proponent of suppression of freedom.
There are multiple questions which raise unhelpful suspicion after single-judge bench granted Zambry with a stay. But a stay remains a stay. A stay is simple a temporary suspension of execution. In the context of Perak, it means a temporary suspension pending decision on the requested appeal by Zambry to the Federal Court against High Court decision made yesterday. It is not an overturn.
In all honesty, that is fair.
Everybody, either for or against the High Court ruling, should take a deep breath and not get too overly excited. The ultimate decision has yet to be made.
In the meantime, while I am not educated in the legal field, I do feel that the next step for Nizar is to file for an injunction to prevent Zambry from using the power of the Menteri Besar Office to do anything else. Just as the stay is fair, an injunction will ensure both sides are being fair.
It is only fair if both sides refrain from doing anything detrimental to the position of both side.
Away from the chaos on the streets of Ipoh and within the hall of Perak state assembly, a storm of short messages kept coming in, flashing and distributing the latest developments faster and wider than anything imaginable in the past.
Enter Twitter.
This is yet another sign of evolution within the already hyperactive Malaysian Internet community.
Truth be told, Twitter is not new among young techno-savvy Malaysians who are always ahead of the curve. Indeed, Twitter is a phenomenon in the US. In Malaysia itself, online press organizations like The Malaysian Insider, Nut Graph, Malaysiakini and even The Star Online do use Twitter.
Furthermore, its potential has been proven. For instance, in Moldova just weeks ago, Twitter played a crucial role in mobilizing a large successful protest against the Communist Party. In times of confusion as people kept wondering what was going on, Twitter was Mercury in that eastern Europe country.
Despite that, its importance did not impress too many Malaysians. That is, until May 7, 2009.
It started quite early in the morning. News of arrests was coming in but it came in slow through various blogs. Online news portals also were contributing but for them, extraordinary heavy traffic was taking its toll. Bandwidth demand spiked as demand spiked. Everybody wanted the latest news, even when there was none to be told.
People just kept refreshing like how that generation of gamers old enough to play the game Diablo on their computer kept clicking their mouse to whack on those devils running loose in a sprawling dark dungeon complex.
Multiple page reloads by thousands were beginning to frustrate both readers and administrations of portals alike. For bloggers, live blogging too was not enough. At the same time, Google Reader was amazingly relatively quiet when such an important event was unfolding in Ipoh.
For those on the ground, they needed something which they could post very quickly through their mobile application. Blogs just would not do. Forget about other more sophisticated content management systems. Those systems were too bulky.
“There has to be some other way to do this.”
That was probably what many were thinking. And yes, the answer is yes, there is.
Twitter is the way. It was time for live micro-blogging. Just type fewer than 140 characters into the Twitter account through any desktop, laptop or phone and Twitter will do everything else.
On Twitter, updates on Perak were up to the minute. It was more frequent than anything on any website. Those on Twitter were becoming the most well-informed observers of the May 7 fiasco, only next to those on the ground Twittering their tweets away to Twitter.
Oh, in case you were born yesterday, or rather, hundreds of years ago, tweets are Twitter updates. They are much like a post of a blog except shorter and crunchier.
From Twitter, messages were replicated across the Twitter universe, to Facebook, later to the blogosphere and online news portals.
Whatever the online media planned to publish — with the exception of their tweets — was yesterday news. And whatever news the mainstream media plans to print or broadcast was stale bread.
Twitter became more effective on May 7 when even state assemblymen and reporters began to Twitter. Information just flew freely and widely without censorship. At the manner information spread, those in power will really have to think twice about censorship. At one point, it appeared that even Kristie Lu Stout of CNN was following tweets by a reporter from The Edge.
After a while when the sitting in the Perak state assembly was adjourned for a second time by a new de facto Speaker and detained individuals released, those tweets slowed down a bit.
But it is not dead.
Twitter lies silently for the next big event, not unlike the black monolith in Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
First published in The Malaysian Insider on May 9 2009.
errata — the statement on Kristie Lu Stout might be inaccurate. While Stout does follow tweets from The Edge and that the reporter did tweet Stout, I cannot say with absolute certainty that Stout did follow the reporter’s tweets. I thank the reporter for clarifying the matter.
Twitter has it that Nizar has won the court case!
CONFIRMED! NIZAR IS STILL MB!
IT IS ELECTION TIME!
In time when Nizar is the third most popular tag in Twitter…
…this is how PM Najib Tun Razak’s tweets look like:
Thanks to Lulu for the idea.
Read the mainstream press and it is hard to miss that the Economic Planning Unit and the Ministry of Finance are trying to market a new economic model to replace old ones. I fear that this new model is misguided and will lead Malaysia down the wrong path.
Read the mainstream press and one will find that it is popular these days to state that Malaysia needs to go up the economic value chain. Almost always accompanying that is rhetoric calling for Malaysia to graduate from its addiction to low-wage, low-skilled workers which, by and large, refers to dependency on cheap foreign labor.
Policy-wise, this has been translated into restriction on recruitment of cheap foreign labor. As proof, an astronomical levy on recruitment of foreign workers was imposed as part of the second stimulus package.
In time of economic slowdown, that particular action does not make sense and luckily, the Najib administration understands this and has decided to postpone it indefinitely. But even without a slowdown, that is no way to move forward due to uncertainty of any country’s development path.
Nonetheless, it is true that Malaysia needs to move up the value chain. We have been benefiting massively from early adoption of a liberal economy but other recently liberalized economies like India and China are finally catching up with Malaysia, and at an amazing pace.
Rapid reduction of poverty and continuous registration of high economic growth are testaments of how fast these countries are catching up after abandoning flawed economic models that ignore the importance of private property as a basis of a society.
Not only are they catching up rapidly thanks to liberalization, with their overwhelmingly larger and cheaper supply of labor, they are crowding out Malaysia and its peers like Thailand and the Philippines from the low-wage, low-skilled and labor-intensive niche. Penang, for instance, is already seeing multinational corporations migrating out from the state to Vietnam and China. This trend occurs because, among other reasons, of the availability of cheaper and larger supply of labor.
From this perspective, Malaysia is indeed losing its competitiveness; Malaysia is unable to compete in a low-wage model. If Malaysia fails to react, challenges from these low-cost countries have the potential to wreak havoc on the Malaysian economy. Fearing being pushed to the margin in the global market, Malaysia seems to be left with nowhere to go but up in the value chain.
Going up does not automatically mean actively restricting recruitment of cheap foreign labor, though. Cheap foreign labor still has roles in the Malaysian economy, even as its importance continue to diminish and even as other countries are able to excel at low-wage, low-skilled industry better than Malaysia.
This point is all the more tenable since in the long run, price equalization will happen to bring some kind of equilibrium between Malaysia and other competing countries.
The new equilibrium for low-wage, low skilled industry — perhaps especially for manufacturing — for Malaysia may be below its current level but the requirement for such industry will still exist since it provides goods or services which are hard if not impossible to trade. Somebody will have to do it.
Restriction on recruitment of cheap foreign labor is doubly unhelpful if the locals themselves refuse to take up low-wage low-skilled jobs. The restriction will create upward pressure on prices which include wages, pushing up the cost of living unnecessarily high when access to a large source of cheap labor to stabilize prices is available in the region.
In an open economy, that pressure will attract cheap supply of labor to act as a counterbalance. If that source is unavailable locally at the right prices, it will come from abroad.
That is already happening in Malaysia and the same trend is observable in the United Kingdom, where Eastern Europeans are taking up low paying jobs which the locals are reluctant to do as cheaply as the immigrants are willing. The same is true in the United States but instead of Eastern Europeans, they are from Mexico or other parts of Latin America.
A restriction on foreign labor will prevent that from happening, forcing prices and wages to go up. I feel this point must be stressed and hence, I repeat, that will inevitably cause the cost of doing business to increase.
The upward pressure on wages has been suggested as a tool to attract talents into Malaysia as an effort to take Malaysia forward beyond low-wage low-skilled economy into the realm of new economy.
This, however, confuses an increase in nominal wealth with an increase in real wealth. What is the point of being paid higher wages when the cost of living goes up accordingly, or higher?
In other words, the restriction which drives nominal wages up really makes no difference in real terms.
It must be noted that any increase in real wealth is largely due to productivity. This is not a mere opinion. Rather, it is an economic fact.
If one is less willing to believe mainstream economic theory due to the unfavorable popular reputation that economists currently suffer, then do refer to any econometric model on the matter; the correlation is strong and the causal relationship is enticing. Any effort at moving up the value chain must take this into account.
By moving up the value chain, it inevitably means greater application of science and innovation to increase productivity. A highly educated workforce will be required if the economy is to enjoy higher productivity.
In light of this, the question is not whether our addiction to cheap labor is a barrier to take the economy to a higher plane.
Instead, the questions that demand answers are: does Malaysia have a highly educated workforce; does Malaysia have the talents to fulfill the prerequisite of a high-value economy?
With a minority of its population holding a graduate degree and with an education system that seeks to brainwash its students rather than encourage critical thinking, it is a stretch to answer the questions in the positive.
That, by no means, is a reason to throw in the towel but it can help to refocus our energy from wrongfully vilifying low-skilled foreign labor to educating Malaysians better.
What is needed is an education system that demands the biggest effort from all. Schools, colleges and universities need to be liberalized to encourage development of competitive, thinking and open minded workforce, not yet more groups to be goaded for political purposes.
While these workforce is being developed, foreign talents should be welcomed and even offered citizenship.
Furthermore, just as the argument that low-cost giants are crowding Malaysia out from the low-wage, low-skilled niche, what actually guarantees that Malaysia can break into the high-value, high-skilled niche already filled with countries that with highly educated workforce?
Somehow, the rhetoric and the central planning action by the government which lead to curbs on foreign labor seems to suggest there is heavy competition in low-skilled industry but not in high-skilled industry.
”It’s crowded here, let’s move over there. Simple.” Well, it is not. While the pay off from a high-value economy is huge, it is naïve to think that there will be no competition.
Just imagine how much resources will be required to reverse the serious brain drain Malaysia has been experiencing for so long. Malaysia is way behind the curve in competition for talents. Compounding the issue is unfair practices by the government that make certain groups of Malaysia unappreciated.
If restriction of employment of cheap foreign labor is used as a stick to force Malaysia up the value chain, the danger is that Malaysia might fail to break into the high-skill niche and then finding itself with a largely dismantled low-skill industry.
With a serious lack of talent in the local economy, Malaysia might not only find itself entrenched in the middle-income trap, it might fall behind in comparison with its peers.
Unnecessary hostile position against cheap foreign labor might cause Malaysia to not have a fallback position if there is an error of judgment.
It is therefore, in my humble opinion, imperative that we ensure the ledge on the other side of the gully is properly secured before we make the jump across rather than chipping off the ledge we are still on. If we find ourselves in mid air only to realize that the ledge on the other side cannot support us, the next place we will be is at the bottom of the gully.
First published in The Malaysian Insider on May 4 2009.