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New Page 14
Like Mahathir, like Aminu?
JONATHAN DAZANG
THOUGH the
hyped move to remove Professor Jibril Aminu from the National Assembly which the
Adamawa State government masterminded stands no chance in hell of succeeding,
the development has somewhat brought to the fore the fascinating parallel
between the Nigerian senator and the legendary modernizer of Malaysia, Dr.
Mahathir Mohammed, who was the Prime Minister from 1981 to October 23, 2003. Dr.
Mahathir was a leading member of the governing Malaysian political party, United
Malay National Organisation, but in 1970 he was expelled for publishing the
book, The Malay Dilemma which was critical of the party’s leadership.
When he returned to the party, his rise became phenomenal. Not only did he
become a legislator, he became the Minister of Education in a country where
education is most prized and also the Minister of Interior, a very senior
cabinet position everywhere in the world. During the long period he served as
the Prime Minister, Malaysia experienced stupendous development as typified by
the emergence of the state-owned Multi-Super Corridor designed to challenge
Silicon Valley of the United States; the state-owned Petronas is one of the
world’s remarkable oil and gas companies. Petronas has the world’s tallest twin
towers situated in Kuala Lumpur.
Despite the determined efforts of the
Western media, non-governmental organisations and politicians to belittle Dr.
Mahathir’s achievements by harping obsessively on the unflattering aspect of his
human rights record, the world recognises that Dr. M, as he is fondly called, is
one of the greatest leaders of the 20th century who within a short period
transformed his nation from being typical Third World backwaters to an eminently
prosperous multiracial society. "In 1965," observed Professor Pat Utomi of the
Lagos Business School at a recent thought-provoking lecture at Covenant
University, "Nigeria’s gross domestic product was $5.8 billion and Malaysia $3.1
billion. By 1995 Malaysia had a 27-fold increase in GDP to $85 billion, and
Nigeria a miserable 3.6-fold increase to $26.8 billion. The Malaysians who were
targeting catching up with Nigeria’s level GDP by the end of the 1980s had an
economy in nominal GDP per capita terms that was 10 times that of Nigeria at the
time of the financial crisis in 1997." May I add that Malaysia’s population is
25 million and Nigeria’s 130 million.
As already adumbrated, Dr. Mahathir and
Senator Jibril Aminu have a number of things in common. Both are medical doctors
who led their undergraduates classes. While Mahathir studied at the National
University of Malaysia, then located in Singapore, Aminu was at the University
of Ibadan. Both made their marks more in the public service than in the medical
profession. Mahathir went into politics no sooner he qualified as a doctor, but
Aminu went to London to become a specialist in cardiology which he was to teach
in both Nigeria and the United States. Aminu had ever since been a vice
chancellor, executive secretary of the National Universities Commission,
Minister of Education, Minister of Petroleum Resources, Ambassador to the United
States, and currently chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, as
well as a member of the Senate Committee on Education, Health and the Air Force,
in addition to being chairman of the Governing Council of the Benue State
University.
Another interesting thing about the two
doctors-turned politicians is that they have excelled in areas they were, in the
opinion of most people, not trained for. Given the fact that they are brilliant
doctors, many people would have expected them to become in their respective
countries the Ministers of Health, rather than of Education. Nor would have many
expected them to run their countries’ petroleum industry. Aminu, as already
stated, was at a point the Minister of Oil and Gas in Nigeria. Mahathir, on the
other hand, did not become the De Jure ministrer of Oil and Gas in Malaysia, but
he did as the Prime Minister bring Petronas under his office. It is a mark of
Dr. Mahathir’s visionary leadership that Petronas has long become a world class
mega company, competing in various parts of the world with such organisations as
Shell, Mobil/Exxon, Chevron-Texaco, etc. The Nigerian National Petroleum
Corporation is, by no means, an international organisation, but it is worthy of
note that the three years which Professor spent as Nigeria’s Petroleum Resources
minister was widely regarded as the golden years in the petroleum industry.
Consequently, there is no former minister who enjoys the same level of affection
in the industry today as he does. There is tremendous demand on him for one
paper or another by industry professionals and general participants.
Which brings us to a passion the two
gentlemen share: a powerful desire to empower their people, a vision to make
their people more productive agents of the economy, a commitment to make the
people authentic participants in the economic activities of their countries,
rather than mere spectators or onlookers or outsiders looking in. Malaysian
society comprises three races, namely, the Malays who are in the majority, the
Chinese and the Indians. The economy is to this day overwhelmingly in the hands
of the Chinese who form some 10 per cent of the population and are, in the
Nigerian parlance, settlers. The Indian community has been doing fairly well,
but not the native Malays who until a few years ago were just hewers of wood and
drawers of water. In his remarkable memoir, From the Third World to First:
The Story of Singapore From 1965 to 2000, the great Lee Kua Yew states in
his characteristic bluntless that the Malays are traditionally more interested
in Islamic mysticism than in the challenges of modernisation.
Fired by an acute sense of both
nationalism and social justice, Mahathir published The Malay Dilemma
which earned him expulsion from the ruling party 34 years ago. The Malays, he
argued eloquently, should decide "whether they should stop trying to help
themselves in order that they should be proud to be the poor citizens of a
prosperous country, or whether they should try to get some of the riches that
this country boasts of, even if it blurs the economic picture of Malaysia a
little." Like many visionaries, Mahathir was soon vindicated. The government
adopted the famous New Economic Policy with its heavy accent of Bumiputras,
literally "sons of the soil." This is the Malaysian version of affirmative
action, or positive discrimination. The result is that today the Bumiputras
control up to 23 per cent of the economy.
As Nigeria’s Petroleum Resources Minister,
Jibril Aminu made a number of innovation, the most outstanding of which is
probably the strategically well thought-out policy of enhancing the local
content in the oil and gas industry, especially the upstream sector. Up to the
time the policy was introduced, local content in this sector was practically
zero. Yet this is the live wire of the Nigerian economy. Aminu convinced
military President Ibrahim Babangida to grant oil licenses to wealthy Nigerians
so that the monopoly enjoined by such multinationals as Shell, Texaco, Mobil,
Elf, Philips, Agip, Chevron, etc. Some of the beneficiaries of this policy are
Mike Adenuga, Yinka Folawiyo, Arthur Eze, Moshood Abiola, Aminu Dantata, Imo
Itsueli, Michael Ibru, Gabriel Igbinedion, Kasa Lawal, etc. These Nigerians
account for three per cent of the 2.4 million barrels of crude oil produced in
Nigeria daily. This percentage of local content in this critical sector is a far
cry from an acceptable situation, but the first step has been taken.
Mahathir’s deep but enlightened
nationalism has for years pitted him against the West, especially over
globalisation. When South-East Asia suffered the economic meltdown which began
in July 1997 with the currency crisis in Thailand and Indonesia, Dr. M sought
assistance from the Breton Woods institutions. The International Monetary Fund,
as expected, came up with the usual prescription: contractionary economic
policy, open up your market for imports, weaken your local currency further,
etc. He did the opposite of dismantling Malaysian borders by mounting an
energetic campaign for patronising Malaysian products and services. He did other
things to protect the integrity of the Malaysian currency and the national
economy. The West laughed him to scorn, accusing him of being obsessed with
introducing autarchy and socialism through the back door in an era of globalism.
A lot of distinguished academics even went to the extent of denying the
existence of any Asian economic miracle, saying the great leap which the
South-East Asian nations witnessed since the 1980s was a fluke. What they fell
short of saying was that any civilisation outside the Western world was invalid.
But within only two years of articulating and producing his own home-grown
economic recovery programme, not only has the Malaysian economy bounced back, it
is now doing better than ever before. The IMF and the West have acknowledged
without reservations that Dr M was right and they wrong. Therefore, Malaysia
stands a good chance of achieving the target of being a fully developed country
by 2020, as decided in 1992 when the Vision 2020 project was launched.
As every perceptive analyst must have
imagined, the factors responsible for Malaysia’s attainment of dizzy development
heights under Dr. Mahathir’s leadership were the articulation of a grand
national modernisation vision whose implementation was regarded as an article of
faith, firm commitment to the well-being of the people, a high level of personal
intelligence, genuine recognition of the pluralistic composition of Malaysian
society, religious-like insistence on the rule of law and, of course, a high
level of personal integrity; if Dr. M had bank accounts in London, Paris,
Geneva, Brussels, etc., he would not have had the moral authority to boldly take
an independent development trajectory for his people which long ago turned out
to be a roaring success. One Nigerian who shares these fine qualities with Dr.
Mahathir, including having a mind of his own and serving for long in the
"juiciest" of places without being fabulously wealthy, is a fellow medical
doctor, Professor Jibril Aminu. Both are good believers who are strongly
committed to peaceful co-existence in their heterogeneous countries as they are
to modernisation. As the world marks the first anniversary of Dr. Mahathir’s
exit as the Malaysian Prime Minister and acknowledges his wonderful footprints
in the sand of time, one cannot but wonder like most Nigerians: When will our
own Dr. M appear to facilitate the process of our leapfrogging so that we can
step into the new world with the rest of the world?
•Dr. Dazang is Executive Director, African Institute for
Governance and Development, Jos, Plateau State
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