Top Advisory Panel for ISJDR

I am surprise by the appointments of the various advisors, not so much about their competency and capabilities, more so from the combinations and racial diversities.

Forgive me for being paranoid as I do suffer from color-phobia. It's damn unusual as Iskandar South Johor Development Region (ISJDR) are owned by Khazanah and UEM, and headed by Johor MB Ghani and Pak Lah as joint-chairman.

2 Malays, 2 Chinese and 1 Indian, what a great combination.

Why not be 2-2-2, and add Ananda Khrisnan? It would be better, wouldn't it?

Is this a sign of acceptance of reality? that in the world of commerce, and for ISJDR to succeed, the leaders know that there is nothing to do with race, religion or creed. It is about competency, capability, international connections and network, and TRUST. For ISJDR to succeed, it must be able to attract international investors and multi-national corporations. ISJDR will also need huge development funds that would have to be sourced from foreign lenders via issuance of bonds and debt-papers.

For Malaysia to succeed and to continue to attract foreign investments, local investments and FDIs, including investments from Singaporeans, governmental policies, rules and regulations that discriminate and marginalized Others scares off all the potential investors. Nobody, no foreigners, will want to bring their monies to a land where insecurities and detrimental policies, dictated by rent-seeking politics and policies, ruled.

Each year, at the UMNO general assembly, you will hear of shouts and cries, and the raising of Keris, to decry about the success of others, except themselves. They claimed uneven level playing fields as the reason. They claimed pendatang came to rob them of their land and properties. They claimed they were bullied and cheated. They claimed that in order to progress, they need monogenesis policies such as the NEP, and that the NEP must be expanded to 70% control, which means that they want 70% ownership of the equity market. But to procure 70%, they would have to pay more than RM500bil; that they are not willing to pay; they want it and won't pay for it; it must be given to them because they had become Scylla and Charybdis, clothed in legal positivism, with monism-political power to change the law and the rules of equity.

That's not enough. They want almost everything and anything which has values, material values of which they don't have to pay for it or work for it; just because they have power and numbers.Schools and universities have to lower down the passing marks or to grant them higher scores irrespective of the competencies so that they gets degrees easily, without the need to study. The result, we have hundreds of thousands of unemployed and unemployable. But there's no worry as the government can create plenty of employment spaces within the civil services and government-linked corporations to fill them.

However, this piece of act, or, (do we call it goodwill gesture) hopefully is the beginning of self-consciousness and awareness would offer justification that our political society has now accepted integrity as a political virtue. Integrity insists that each citizen must accept demands on him, and may make demands on others, that share and extend the moral dimension of any explicit political decisions. It fuses citizens' moral and any argument for legitimacy must be able to account for the fact that political obligations are not consensual.

Political obligation is an associative obligation, which means that the special responsibilities social practice attaches to membership in some biological and social group, becomes part of the moral landscape and becomes the most consequential obligations of all.

It is hope that we would be transformed into a true community who endorsed the ideal of integrity and ensure that its collective decisions are matters of obligation and not bare power, in the name of fraternity.