This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly, on November 30 - December 6, 2015.

A strong government is one that is effective. It is able to deliver to the populace what is needed by them. It is where things work. It is not just about what a government should provide — public safety, protection of property rights, access to education, health and other basic needs and intangibles such as freedom and the fundamental liberties enshrined in the Constitution.

A strong government thus protects our rights, allows diverse voices to be heard and the conflicts between us to be fairly adjudicated. It takes a strong government to protect individual rights.

A weak government, on the other hand, is ineffective. It does not deliver the goods, so to speak. It is also unstable as different parts of government are functioning at different levels. It is however still endowed with the powers to govern. Therein lies the dangers of a weak government. It can be at odds with its own citizens and use that power against them instead of protecting them.

Most of all, a weak government contains the seeds of its own destruction — it becomes anaemic and is eventually hollowed out by corruption, the scourge of good governance.

The governor of the Reserve Bank of India, Raghuram Rajan, is an accomplished economist who takes a broad view of his role as the central banker. He comments on a wide range of issues that are related to India’s economy. He gave an interesting speech a year ago during the Doshi Memorial Lecture, which basically asked: Why do we keep electing corrupt politicians? He proceeded to give an economic answer to this political phenomenon.

His argument is that people — who happen to be voters in a democracy — seek politicians or aspiring politicians for help in dealing with a government whose delivery mechanisms have broken down in some form. They seek recommendations to gain entry into public colleges, obtain licences of some sort, or get low-cost housing, or a job with the government. The politician has access to power and can work through the system to fulfil these requests, which he will gladly do in return for popularity, the currency of politics.

The beneficiaries of these political favours do not care about how the politicians go about greasing the system or even how they finance their campaigns. They could not care less about the governance with regard to the relationship between the politician and any businessmen with whom he may have a symbiotic relationship, using his position in public office. As long as the voter gets what he wants from the politician, the politician gets his vote. And the corrupt politician is re-elected and the system is corrupted.

Rajan was making the point that an effective government is imperative to get many other things right. It will remove the need to lobby for services from the government, as such a government would have delivered its services fairly and adequately, and the extent of corruption and corrupt practices would be curtailed.

I find this to be a compelling argument and recognise that to obtain an effective government, it must necessarily be a strong government, as defined earlier. It did not escape Rajan’s observation that despite India’s democracy and robust democratic institutions, one cannot characterise the Indian government as a strong government in the sense we have discussed earlier.

This conclusion resonates with Francis Fukuyama’s latest book,  Political Order and Political Decay, where he posited that liberal democracy alone — the practice and institutions of participative democracy — is not enough to obtain a strong government.

The US is an example of an almost dysfunctional government despite having the right institutions and processes. Germany, under its first Chancellor Bismark and Hitler’s Third Reich, had effective governments. But without democratic traditions and constraints, such effective governments can be mobilised to do untold harm to others and therefore, eventually, to themselves.

China is a present-day example of a non-democratic effective government that has been successful in modernising and developing China. The Chinese, and the Germans too, have highly effective civil administrations and bureaucracies that work. It would seem from all these observations that while democracy is not sufficient for a strong government, a functioning bureaucracy is a necessary condition for a strong government.

The northern European governments, big and expensive as they are relative to the economy, have strong governments. They are expensive but things work. And underlying it all are well developed and functioning democratic institutions.

Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak started his reform efforts via the Government Transformation Programme (GTP) before embarking on the Economic Transformation Programme (ETP). Both seem to have lost steam. He should go back to the GTP and focus his efforts there. It will probably be his positive legacy.

As an economist, I am sceptical of the approach and premise of the ETP — economic actors will know what to do and decide once they are clear on the prices and incentive mechanisms they are facing. Economic growth, what more economic transformation, cannot be programme-managed by the government, but the GTP is within the government’s domain and a successful GTP will fundamentally change relative prices and incentive structures in a positive way for economic growth to happen.

Reforming towards obtaining a strong government is the best economic reform we can have — and that is what the administration should focus on. The public sector is about a fifth of the economy and its efficiency and efficacy are necessary for both a strong government and a strong economy. And since we have in the statutes such things as “crimes of undermining parliamentary democracy”, we must realise that a weak government is the biggest crime undermining parliamentary democracy. Without reform, the government itself may be the biggest culprit undermining parliamentary democracy.

A strong government will serve the needs of the population and get out of its way. While the personal well-being of a citizen is a matter of governmental responsibility at some point, government should not intrude into the personal lives of its citizens. There are those who advocate that even personal choices must be curtailed by a monolithic belief derived from a group of people but imposed on everyone. And anyone who opposes this homogenising concept is labelled a threat in a manner suggesting that it is more sinister than terrorism. The government should not be part of this terrorising its own citizens in this manner.

Introducing a concept such as secularism in this sort of discussion will oftentimes not be fruitful but I will hazard the risk to suggest here that the state, the government, while firmly resting on the Rukunegara principle of “Belief in God”, must remain apart from the interpretation of the form and substance of faith in God.

A monolithic state view of religion, any religion, will turn it into a theocratic state which renders democratic institutions and processes useless; it takes away religious freedom as a principle tenet of our Constitution. It marginalises beliefs other than that of the state, and may lead to their criminalisation.

This is happening in Malaysia with the move to institutionalise Islam via public institutions with laws criminalising interpretations of beliefs, manifestations of those beliefs, behaviour and even what to read and write. Apart from the obvious human fallibility of those deciding what’s right and wrong and enforcing these laws, this state religiosity takes away the universality and transcendence of Islam and makes it the mundane affair of Man, warts and all.

A strong government also allows the citizenry to organise. The now infamous YAPEIM, a foundation for Muslims’ economic development, was an example, I thought, of how Muslims can get together using their own resources and devices to further an agenda of developing the community. The governance framework and how it should conduct its business should be obvious, given that it is a charitable organisation by incorporation and one with welfare-enhancing objectives.

As always, when public resources are involved, the governance is not just at the entity’s level — compliance with policies, limits and internal controls. It must also subject itself to public governance and scrutiny. A regulatory regime should have compelled entities such as YAPEIM to publicly disclose all their financials from day one. There are no such disclosures.

The overall oversight and regulatory framework for foundations and societies should be improved so that they can flourish as community-driven socio-economic institutions in this country. Groups of people with common interests, whatever they are, should be able to come together and do what they want to do to benefit others. But we must first start with the ability to discern right from wrong, which can be more difficult than is obviously the case.

Dr Nungsari Radhi is an economist and managing director of Prokhas Sdn Bhd, a Ministry of Finance advisory company. The views expressed here are his own.

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