As always, Saifulislam posted another well-written entry which you can see here. My comment is a bit long, so I will post it in my blog as below.
There was one comment on that entry that I want to pick on. It goes like this:
#4 mUTIARA HATI Says:
February 5th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
setuju dengan isu yang usta utarakantetapi perlu sama kita fahami bahawa tahap awam dan pemikiran mrk dah terlalu jauh kebelakang so :-
Negara berkekebajikan adalah first step ( pemimpin berjiwa kebajikan)
Masyarakat berekebajikan adalah second step ( all rakyat suka buat kebajikan )
Slow slow
Moga all kita berjaya dengan usaha membantu usaha tersebut
tksh
With all the due respect to the person who posted this comment, this is a totally upside down thinking. A nation that can be considered as “baldatun tayyibah” starts not with the government. It starts with the people and the civil society. The Prophet first created a Muslim society – a “welfare society” if you like – in Makkah.
To start building a welfare society by firstly building a welfare state does not have any precedence in modern political history. What we see in the modern world, especially in Britain (which is now having to deal with the problems of having created a welfare state), is huge difficulty to remove welfare dependency. If the first step is Welfare State, then the second step would be searching for ubat pening to cure our headache caused by the stress of trying to stop welfare dependency.
I must also admit that the concept a welfare state is among the best promise that any party can give to the electorates. You are basically telling the electorate: “Vote for me and I will give you freebies, or at least discounts”. It will buy you votes, for sure. But that is exactly what you are doing. You are buying votes – like a legalised form of rasuah.
Filed under: Freedom & Liberty, Malaysia, Politics
Good point. and I agree with the concept of ‘Baldatun tayyibah’. But problem is the gap beetween the rich and the poor is huge ( not as huge as in India/Indonesia). You still find houses without electricity and good source of water, children without education, health facilities are very few in certain areas in Malaysia, etc, etc..
So, nak tak nak these places have to vote the ‘majority’ one, the one with convincing promises.
err..not much comment.
i just felt that i’m missing many things since leaving malaysia particularly the society itself.
when i read the mainstream papers, everybody put their smile faces.
the latest one was sambutan hari belia negara that gathering many young generations..they seems very happy and supportive.
i’m never go downside to see the real problems of our society that peoples always discussing withou ending..
reading is just not good-enough.
i have much respect to the people/alternative coalition because they need to face two main issues; the system itself and their truly oppositions.
they need to put much efforts to have the fair and square systems, in the same there were a need to attract enough vote and facing the strength of their opposed parties.
sometimes, i’m just thinking that i’m tired enough to deal with our country system, but still got an interest to get involved in politic.
so that we can present our solid arguement on developing the countries, not required anymore to having tough battle with the system.
the ideas to work in other countries like UK or Ireland will be an alternatives
the voters will decide based on our manifesto.
if we lost, thats because we are noot good enough and its acceptable.
why the peoples at malaysia never ever tired even, they have notice that its will be really huge possibilities to lost..
that comes to what we learned form usrah
i agree with your point above. I just want to add some points that seems missing or incomplete from your argument. Based on the reality in Malaysia, with such backward education system, and no freedom of information, intellectually restricting acts, we will never ever be able to produce a welfare society. Therefore, to be able to produce such society, we need a big change in education and economic sector. Only with political power, then we will be able to educate the people that we will not always be rich, oil reserve is getting smaller, and teach them to be independent and to stand on their own feets.
In Kelantan, programs which require and motivate the poor people to work hard is introduced such as Ladang Rakyat,and Jihad Ternak. In such programs, they will only get more return if they work hard. Now, we can see that, given the chance and good advice, those poor people are willing to work harder, to improve their quality of life. Imagine, how we can provide the chance for them if we dont have the power.
Those are only small things that we can do, with all the handicaps and restrictions from the federal. I believe more such programmes in bigger scale can be implemented, which will benefit all Malaysians, if only we get enough power to do it.
Let’s get into power, before Malaysia become bankrupt or bought by Israeli-Singapore government. If the people are willing to change their vote to BA, that’s good enough at the moment.I believe the change must come from every level and the wave is there already. Allah, please save my country Malaysia.
Zack,
I agree with your comment. There are other institutional problems that need to be addressed in Malaysia, particularly those issues surrounding the institutions to check and balance Executive powers in a liberal democracy. This is indeed one of the things that I am looking into, and colleagues in MTT are working hard on this issue (I cannot thank ‘Abidin enough for his ongoing hardwork on this important issue).
As to your examples of Ladang Rakyat and Jihad Ternak, these are two schemes I am well aware of. These are good examples of “welfare to work” programmes, which, in the specific cases that you mentioned, I think is good.
But I disagree with the connotation that political power is the panacea. I am sceptical of the ever-increasing size of the state. This is still a huge problem with almost all political parties in Malaysia, PAS included. But it is worse in the ruling coalition becuase they are in power and they are (ab)using state powers we entrust to them. What I DO NOT want to happen is, because we do not think carefully before coming to power, we become just like them after a term in office.
I must also say that you should not take my posts to mean that I suggest you vote for parties other than PAS. Of course, that is if you are a PAS-voter (If you are not a PAS-voter, why in the world NOT???). Debates, and especially public debates, should be encouraged and it should not be seen as detracting “to the other side”.
PAS has made huge progress by proactively promoting some policy ideas even at this early stage. This is an excellent development, which is praiseworthy. I may disagree with some policy ideas, and I do not buy the things some control-freaks keep saying about “keputusan telah dibuat jadi jangan tanya soalan banyak-banyak”. That sounds very communist to me.
I will continue to speak because I want PAS to become more liberal in their approach to govern Malaysia.
Salam.
Sorry for my late comment – I missed the last train.
If anyone can find it, I would like to recommend a book, “Welfare State and Welfare Society: Illusion and reality.” (1975). I forget who the author (a Briton) but I found it in Seremban public library.
The author agreed that the society has to do their role in order for an efficient welfare state to exist. Mainly because welfare state still stand on the basis of capitalistic economy. And the exact definition of the welfare state also does not exist. Some countries have their own way to describe ‘welfare’. Even Malaysia can also been said said as welfare state – depending on who you ask.
But I want to highlight that the author didn’t believe welfare state first, than the society. His reason is simple, how a man in his comfort live can ever think of the poor one?
Insya-Allah, I believe that, if Malaysia is governed parallel with the teaching of Islam, automatically it will be a welfare state. Because the term ‘welfare state’ itself is just a name given by political scientist and economist to describe a diluted (or perhaps responsible) capitalist state.
what do you think of zakat system in Islam? Is that socialism? So should the Islamic party come into power, zakat system should be abolished…? Why don’t you suggest that Zakat shouldn’t be as it is now in Islam because it sounds socialistic…?
Because I do not think zakat is socialistic. At only 2.5%, the rate of zakat shows us that taxation must be low – a fundamental principle of a pro-market economy.
Do you think zakat should be abolished? Because if you do, you better say your shahadah again. But if you yourself don’t think zakat should be abolished, why are you asking me a loaded question on something that you already know? Are you trying to show that you are clever? I don’t think it is working because it only makes you sound rather like a nincompoop.
Whether it is 1%, 4%, or 20% people can always argue what is too much and what is too little. Too little for me might be too much for you. The subjective nature of this matter can lead people to come with all sorts of theory to actually put some sort of figure as to what the government must take from the rich to give to the poor and the needy. It is actually enlightening for me to learn that zakat itself is the basis of Islamic economy. You don’t own all of your money and the people/government do not take all of your money.