The Best Prime Minister We Never Had – In Memory of Adlan Benan Omar (1973 – 2008)

Malaysia lost two great people on Thursday 24 January 2008. One of them you would by now know very well, and another you probably have never heard of. One had filled the pages of major mainstream newspapers but the other, being on the other side of the political devide, only managed to fill the blogosphere. One was known by the name of Tan Sri Megat Junid and another affectionately called Ben by his friends.

Browsing through the pages of Malaysian bloggers’ community, Harakah-daily and Suara Keadilan, one would not have missed the news of the death of the young Malaysian intellectual, Adlan Benan Omar at the age of 35. He was a man with extraordinary intellect. Educated at MCKK, then Abingdon School in Oxford and later graduated with double degrees in Law and History at Cambridge University. He was the first foreign head boy in his high school having won student’s election beating both Conservative and Labour student candidates for the top post. He was co-founder of Cambridge University Malaysian Association (Cumas), founder of student body UKEC and the 1997 recipient of Malaysia Youth award.

He was known among his friends as a walking encyclopedia because of his wealth of knowledge and his ability to memorise facts. Back in 1994, over a weekend night in the dormitory of one of our friends at Cambridge, we had a conversation about Malaysian history and Ben pointed out that there were a lot of errors in our history books. His knowledge of Malaysian history left deep impression on me as he dived into the depth of it and gave us impromptu lecture with the flair of a story teller. His room at Cambridge was full of books. His love of books and his powerful neurons absorbed everything he read like a sponge. I still keep the book on British politics that he gave me as a souvenir. I was doing engineering and had little interest in history, but he did spark my interest in that subject. I still cannot figure out what he was saying to me as he signed the book in Latin!

He was an excellent debater too, with words flowing smoothly out of his mouth in both Malay and English. On one occasion when the Malaysian Deputy Education Minister visited Malaysian students in the university, he started his speech in English but later switched to Malay because he said, to everybody’s laughter, it was an official function and thus must be conducted in Malay. Since I left Cambridge in 1995, I had not seen or heard of him but I knew that one day this guy would become a great man. Reading from the blogs, people who knew him spoke favourably of him. Everybody who had met him spoke of how impressed they were of him. One of the blogs said that even Dr Mahathir joked to him about how one day he would fill in his (Dr M’s) shoes i.e. becoming Prime Minister. He would be a perfect match for UMNO’s own Oxford-educated whiz-kid Khairy Jamaludin. In fact, some years back Ben and Khairy had faced off in a famous debate at John Hopkins University, USA.

I remember he was telling us back in 1994 that he would die young because of his illness which he had since he was 18. I thought it was brave of him to face the reality of his life and yet still managed to live a happy life, going around telling jokes as if he had no serious health problem. He contributed much to his chosen political party, his ideals and his vision for the development of his race and country. Even while he was quite ill, he gave his ideas in helping how to develop the economy of Kelantan, a state often overlooked by Putrajaya because of politics. Ben, you would have been a great Prime Minister but Allah loved you more. May Allah bless your soul. Al-Fatihah.

Anger over a cup of coffee

It was raining very heavily outside my office building at the time I was about to leave for home. There was no way for me to get to my car parked in an open space parking a few blocks away without getting myself soaking wet. Without an umbrella, I’d have to wait until the downpour stopped. I made my way down to the shopping mall attached to the building, found a seat at a western-style coffee shop, ordered two doughnuts and a cup of latte while hoping for the rain to stop. I paid 12 ringgit and 50 cents for the snack and quickly settled in a comfy cushion seat to enjoy the expensive drink.

As I was sipping the cocktail of milk and ground coffee, I wondered how much of the money I just paid actually got to the poor farmers of Colombia, Brazil or Ethiopia. According to the BBC, there are as many as 25 million small-scale coffee farmers producing coffee around the world. The market for take-away coffee has trebled from USD30bn to USD90bn over the past decade, and shows no sign of slowing down. In the US alone, it increased 10% last year, when compared with 2005. In recent years however, coffee price hit a 30-year low.

It is estimated that the coffee shops can get 80 cups of coffee for every kilo of coffee beans, each cup can cost up to USD6 in Europe while farmers in developing countries are paid around USD2 per kilo. Some coffee farmers in Ethiopia are earning less than USD1 a day. And it did not make sense that I just paid about USD2 for a cup of coffee when the farmers there had to do 2 days of hard labour to earn the same money.

The Starbucks Coffee company, one of the biggest coffee chains in the world, opens a new Starbucks Coffee shop somewhere in the world every four hours. The company denies any practice of unfair trade and its website speaks proudly of its record of Corporate Social Responsibility. But behind the huge image building PR through the media, lie some less rosy pictures. In 2006, Starbucks was accused of trying to block Ethiopia’s move to trademark three of its homegrown premium coffee in the US. I imagined how powerful a global corporation like Starbucks could be if it could even take on a Third World government to ensure its maximum profitability. What chance do the coffee farmers have of getting fair deal from their hard labour? It sounds scary when you think about that and imagine how vulnerable our government position would be in the face of fierce negotiation for a bi-lateral Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the government of the most powerful economy in the world.

By the time I emptied my cup, there was so much anger that I felt I needed another cup of coffee to drain out the feeling. The sweet taste of the doughnuts calmed me down. I finished the last bits of the honey coated crumbs and stepped out to check the rain. I saw the mamak stall across the street and thought to myself I should have gone into that shop instead. The coffee would be cheaper and I would not have fed myself with so much anger.

1 Muharam 1429.

Keeping up with Rumour Mongers

I welcomed the new year with a phone call from my brother a few hours before mid night urging me to go and fill up my car before 12 o’clock. He said that petrol price would be raised by 40 sen at midnight on the new year. He had heard rumours going around and people started queuing up at some filling stations across KL. I said I didn’t see anything unusual when I was driving back from office on New Year's eve. Besides, it would not make much difference if I filled up then or on the next day because the most I could save was only on a tankful of petrol. I would have to fill up the whole of water tank in my home to realise any significant savings from a sudden fuel hike.

Now just days into the new year, people are queuing up again at supermarkets because of rumours that cooking oil price would be hiked soon. It is a pity that we are the world’s largest producer of palm oil yet the government has had to ration it because of panic buying due to rumour mongering. Almost two years back there was severe shortage of sugar in some parts of the country because of rumours that the government would allow the price of sugar to go up. The shortage was severe then, as it is now, closer to border areas because of hoarding by traders hoping to make quick bucks when the price is actually increased. There are also a lot of smuggling activities along our porous border. Utusan Malaysia reports that it is now easier to get cooking oil in the town of Sg Golok on the other side of the border than in Rantau Panjang.

The issue here is not the price hike. Prices will always go up anyway because of inflation. The real issue is people’s tendency to believe in rumours and act irrationally upon hearing them. To me, this underlies public distrust of official sources of news and their natural tendency to believe in pseudo-news spread by SMS or chain e-mails. Recent spread of false SMS about ethnic riots in some parts of KL is a manifestation of this phenomenon. The mandatory registration of pre-paid mobile number does not seem to have the intended effect of controlling the spread of false rumours via SMS. And you cannot blame the public either because our official sources of news have thrown their integrity out of the window and at times they themselves become rumour mongers. If you ask me who started all these rumours, I will not be able to give an accurate answer. But in all likelihood, those who gain most from the spread of a rumour are the ones most likely to start it.

7 January 2008