Occassionally i struggle really hard to reconcile 2 polarising points about malaysia.
We have a clusterfuck of a politics. The ruling party is corrupt. Dap is shortsighted and can't move past its old ways, pkr is too obsessed with anwar and is too close to umno ideologically, and pas imagines itself as some kind of savior of islam, as if a religion so successful needs saving. Our people (more accurately my facebbok friends and lyn forums) too have shown themselves to be immature and unable to view things beyond a simple balck and white and everyone is either a macai or opposition diehard. Our tendency to accept wrongdoing when its in our favor really displays the hypocrisy in our so called "principles". Theres also an obssession with worshipping foreign countries as if its some heaven on earth and malaysia is like the shithole of the planet. When have we become so "narrow" in our view?
Our population is young and growing. Average age is abt 28 to 29... And we are projected to hit 40m in 2050 from 30m today. We are a relatively big market, transitioning from upper middle incomes to right under the high income range. The so called usd15k per capita is about 10 years away from our present usd11k per capita, and thats on a national level. Klang valley taken on its own we are actually quite close to seoul/south korea on per capita basis which puts us as a quasi developed city. There is alot of money to be made. The great old monies were made during americas boom years and we may not know it.. But malaysia is having its boom years. Incomes are rising.. And so is cost of living. (Your cost is always someone elses revenue). Which feeds into the incomes of businesses, and on a whole, the capitalist group is becoming more powerful than ever. EPF is incredibly solid as an investment vehicle, and by some measure we have sufficient foreign assets to meet our foreign debt. Our country really isnt what it was in the 1990s. Despite the bitching that msia is a shithole from my friends, my facebook is filled with holidays to japan and europe, perhaps an anecdoctal sign of rising affluence in our nation, when such holidays used to be dreams to many. Even 1mdb is not a significant risk to the overall health of our country (take news with a piece of salt). 1Mdb even if it fails will NOT bring the country down. We have tremendous capacity to absorb that sort of hit. (Consider this.. Malaysia's annual tax spending is rm200b.).
So, I wonder which of these 2 forces will prevail. Will the gutter politics sabotage the economic engine? Or will the inevitably of population growth and income growth force politics to be more mature?