Ungku Aziz’s lasting footprints in the nation’s sands of time

Jomo Kwame Sundaram 

Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly, December 25, 2023 - January 7, 2024

The Edge Malaysia 03 Jan 2024, 01:00 pm https://theedgemalaysia.com/node/695953

Ungku Aziz was seen by many of his contemporaries as a ‘Renaissance man’ — a man of letters, a man seriously interested in the arts and, philosophically speaking, one who appreciated knowledge, ilm, science

All of us are undoubtedly much influenced by the circumstances in which we live. Profesor Diraja Dr Ungku Abdul Aziz Ungku Abdul Hamid (Jan 28, 1922 to Dec 15, 2020) chose a path less well taken by his peers of privilege, dedicating himself instead to a nation not yet born, to the poor, the solidarity economy and conserving the rich cultural heritage of the Malays.

After all, Ungku Aziz was born and spent the first few years of his long and eventful life in London. A grand-nephew of New Johor’s first Sultan Abu Bakar, his mother was Armenian-French and paternal grandmother Circassian from the Ottoman palace.

It would have been unsurprising if he had taken a different path. But he chose a path less well trodden, dedicating himself to a post-colonial nation not yet in existence, then still “imagined” differently by various cultural communities and political tendencies.

He chose not to study abroad, not even to return to the University of Cambridge of his father. Instead, Ungku Aziz chose to study at Raffles College, and subsequently worked at the University of Malaya, first in Singapore, and later in Kuala Lumpur. This was an unexpected choice, especially for someone as privileged as Ungku Aziz. But it anticipates other choices he would make.

Singapore in Malaya

When the Japanese invaded Malaya from Dec 8, 1941, and the British surrendered Singapore 10 weeks later, Ungku was barely 21 and studying at Raffles College. The Japanese wanted to groom young scions of Malay aristocrats for collaboration. In Japan, Ungku became a ward of the Shogun, Tokugawa.

The role of Sharifah Azah, Ungku Aziz’s wife, has not been fully acknowledged. Azah Aziz was immersed in Malay journalism and culture. She opened up a world often superficially known to men in the larger Malay world of letters. With her help, Ungku Aziz articulated many women’s concerns.

After Japan’s surrender, Ungku Aziz continued at Raffles College, where he received first-class honours in economics. In 1949, the college became the core of the new University of Malaya (UM). Despite the many options open to him, he chose Serving the Nation, the title of his collected works.

Less mentioned today is Ungku Aziz’s role in establishing the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (DBP). Supported by Utusan Melayu and Angkatan Sasterawan 50, or ASAS 50, UM’s Malay Language Society organised a historic conference at UM in Singapore in 1955.

This led to DBP’s establishment in 1958 in Johor Bahru under Ungku Aziz’s leadership. For an anglophone, often surrounded by Anglophiles, his new role was all the more remarkable.

Ungku Aziz was seen by many of his contemporaries as a “Renaissance man” — a man of letters, a man seriously interested in the arts and, philosophically speaking, one who appreciated knowledge, ilm, science. At UM, he initiated the teaching and study of the history and philosophy of science, personally giving lectures himself.

Perhaps inspired by the 1947 Perlembagaan Rakyat (People’s Constitution) and Utusan Melayu, Ungku promoted the Malay language in an inclusive way. Progressive students at the Chinese-medium Nanyang University were thus inspired to demand a Malay studies programme, reflecting their inclusive sense of what the new nation should be.

His promotion of Malay letters and the arts more generally was also significant. At UM, Ungku found niches for the visual artists Ibrahim Hussain and Syed Ahmad Jamal, among others. He chose Ariff Ahmad, a significant cultural figure in his own right, to set up UM’s Pusat Budaya.

UM honoured writer Ishak Haji Muhammad, or Pak Sako, once chair of the Labour Party of Malaya. With PAS head Dr Burhanuddin al-Helmy, Socialist Front (SF) leader Ahmad Boestamam, former Umno minister Aziz Ishak and Pak Sako were detained under the Internal Security Act in the mid-1960s. Ungku Aziz even spoke at the SF coalition’s events, mainly in Labour Party education programmes.

Ungku Aziz was instrumental in setting up Lembaga Urusan Tabung Haji in 1961. The initiative built on his early 1950s research investigating the low savings rate among rural Malays. His late 1950s follow-up note proposed how to encourage savings without involving interest.

Tabung Haji has since sought to promote Malay savings while avoiding interest. These savings are also linked to the prospect of fulfilling the Muslim duty to go on pilgrimage to the holy land.

Of course, Ungku was closely associated with the development of higher education in Malaysia. However, his contributions are only partly captured by the official institutional histories of these institutions, including UM.

Poverty and exploitation

Besides Ungku Aziz’s role in building at least three major Malaysian institutions, three major intellectual contributions are also worth noting. Despite being born into privilege, Ungku made an “option for the poor”, trying to deepen public understanding of poverty, especially among rural Malays.

Sadly, his “sarong index” proposal for asset estimation has been much mocked, so much so he did not want attention to it later in life. Although superseded by other measures, it was an eminently practical measure of the modest assets of rural Malays in the 1950s and beyond.

Today, people prefer using monetary income as a measure of well-being. But historically, this has not been the best measure of income, assets or well-being. Money measures can mislead as researchers who study incomes and assets of poor rural communities readily testify.

Contrast the well-being of poor rice farmers to rubber smallholders with higher cash incomes. Fieldwork in Kedah found children of poorer rice farmers much healthier due to supplementary nutrition from rice fields (for example, “cheap” canal fish) not available from rubber land.

Nutritional well-being not well captured by money measures probably influenced Ungku Aziz’s interest in “protein poverty”.

Even today, poverty is still often blamed on the poor, for having the wrong values or ideas. In the 1970s, Ungku’s cousin, Prof Syed Hussein Alatas repudiated such notions in his The Myth of the Lazy Native.

His early 1970s work, Siapa Yang Salah?, had demolished Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s The Malay Dilemma and Umno’s Revolusi Mental blaming poor Malays’ “wrong” ideas and attitudes. New versions of such thinking remain influential, invoking new pseudo-scientific jargon cloaked in fashionable new discourses and language.

Ungku Aziz’s understanding of exploitation involved many elements, not only commercial, marketing or supply chains. Ungku Aziz emphasised credit and debt, elaborated by Mokhzani Abdul Rahim, one of his early students. Likewise, the question of land, the most important productive asset in agriculture, was emphasised by Syed Husin Ali, among others.

Nationalism

In an age of decolonisation, Ungku Aziz wrote on nationalism, still not deemed a subject amenable to economic analysis. Clearly, he was responding to the challenges of the times as he saw them.

Ungku Aziz recognised the major challenge of his times as that of nation-building. His Jejak-jejak di Pantai Zaman (Footprints in the Sands of Time from Za’aba to Aziz) traced the evolution of Malay understandings of poverty and backwardness while hinting at the special needs of the new nation.

Tun Abdul Razak Hussein’s 1971 New Economic Policy sought to create conditions for forging the new nation after May 1969 by reducing poverty and inter-ethnic disparities via affirmative action programmes. This challenge was taken up again in Mahathir’s Vision 2020, which included forging a bangsa Malaysia (Malaysian nation), first mentioned, without elaboration, by Abdul Razak in 1971.

Sadly, more than six decades after Malayan independence, we seem further away from building that nation. For Ungku Aziz, as for all who agreed to the compromises underlying the 1947 Perlembagaan Rakyat demanding independence, patriotism, not genealogy, was to be the basis for citizenship. We must now earn this inheritance from Pak Ungku’s invaluable legacy.

Nothing to Learn from East Asia?

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

KUALA LUMPUR: Covid-19 infection and death rates in the Western world and many developing countries in Asia and Latin America have long overtaken East Asia since the second quarter of 2020. Perhaps unsurprisingly, considering prevailing Western accounts of the Asian financial crises, there have been no serious efforts to draw policy lessons from East Asian contagion containment.

Lockdowns necessary?

Although most East Asian economies have successfully contained the pandemic without nationwide ‘stay in shelter lockdowns’, many governments have seen such measures as necessary. But lockdowns are blunt measures, with inevitable adverse consequences, especially for businesses and employment.

Many countries have thus imposed lockdowns, citing China’s response in Wuhan. But as the first WHO fact-finding mission to China noted, “The majority of the response in China, in 30 provinces, was about case finding, contact tracing, and suspension of public gatherings—all common measures used anywhere in the world to manage [infectious] diseases.

Lockdowns were limited to a few cities where contagion went “out of control in the beginning”. The key lesson from China was “all about…speed. The faster you can find the cases, isolate the cases, and track their close contacts, the more successful you’re going to be.”

To be sure, lockdowns ‘flatten the curve’ by temporarily preventing further contagion. But unless accompanied by appropriate complementary measures, undetected infectious individuals may cause silent community transmission that becomes evident only too late. Instead of lockdowns, it is far more prudent to find and isolate cases before numbers become unmanageable.

South Korean lessons

The Republic of Korea was the first country to dramatically reduce the number of Covid-19 cases and related deaths without nationwide movement restrictions. It checked the spread of Covid-19 infections without imposing lockdowns, even in Daegu its most infected city.

Mass testing has been key to its response, doing the most by mid-March. By late March, Korea’s newly confirmed cases had fallen from second to eighth place in the world. Meanwhile, Korean authorities urged physical distancing, personal hygiene and remote work while discouraging mass gatherings.

The government also had legal authority to collect phone, credit card and other data to expedite contact tracing, and initially only restricted incoming travellers from Hubei province, where Wuhan is, for precautionary reasons, and from Japan in political retaliation.

Just as China had rapidly identified pathogen characteristics using artificial intelligence and big data access, Korea innovatively deployed new technologies to expedite rapid responses to trace, test, treat and isolate those infected.

Lessons from Vietnam

Three months ago, a Vietnamese official described how “Vietnam is fighting Covid without pitting economic growth against public health”. Besides testing and contact-tracing, “the government has depoliticised the pandemic, treating it purely as a health crisis, allowing for effective governance”.

Hence, there is “no political motive for government officials to hide information, as they don’t face being reprimanded if there are positive cases in their authority area that are not due to their mistakes”.

He noted that “With the head of the Hanoi centre for disease control being arrested for suspected corruption in relation to the purchase of testing kits, and small traders getting fines for price-gouging face-masks, the government has also been clear that public health cannot be entangled with commercial interests”.

After China announced its first infections and deaths in January 2020, “Vietnam tightened its border and airport control of Chinese visitors. This wasn’t an easy decision, given that cross-border trade with China accounts for a significant part of the Vietnamese economy”.

Vietnam also “took precautionary measures above and beyond World Health Organization recommendations”. Preparations started “a week before the outbreak was officially declared a public health emergency of international concern, and more than a month before WHO declared Covid-19 a pandemic”.

The communist-led government also ensured “freedom of information on Covid-related matters”. “Lockdown and isolation are more selective” from the outset, without resorting to nationwide lockdowns, as has happened elsewhere without much benefit.

Vietnam is one of the few countries with “positive GDP growth” in 2020; “the supposed trade-off between the economy and public health… looks to be something of a false choice”.

In their war, Vietnam is believed to have lost over three million people compared to 58,209 US lives. In fighting the virus, Vietnam, with 97 million people, has lost 35 lives so far, while the US, with a 332 million population, has lost almost four hundred thousand.

Mass testing crucial

After a year of living with Covid-19, all governments can learn a great deal from critical evaluation of their own country experiences, other experiences as well as accumulated, especially new knowledge relevant to feasible policy options.

Thus far, appropriate East Asian policy measures for rapid early detection, isolation and contact tracing, while protecting the most vulnerable and treating the infected, have succeeded in flattening the curve.

More reliable, cheaper methods (e.g., ‘lateral-flow’ antigen tests) allow more frequent mass testing. As undetected cases are more likely to spread infection, such tests enable more frequent, faster and easier testing and quicker results, and facilitate faster, more efficacious actions.

This can help check contagion by identifying more of those infected earlier, thus reducing transmission. Even though less accurate than supposed ‘gold standards’, lower costs allow more widespread and frequent testing to identify many more of those infected.

Easier to administer and delivering results more rapidly, such cheaper, simpler and quicker tests more speedily detect the infected, especially among the asymptomatic, in time for appropriate and timely action.

As SARS-CoV-2 transmission peaks several days after infection, together with the viral load, more frequent testing is necessary to check contagion. More frequent mass testing is probably going to detect many more of those infected much earlier, while they are still infectious.

Look East

In the early 20th century, a young Cambridge-trained doctor, Wu Lien Teh returned to practice in the British colony of Penang where he mobilised thousands against the opium trade. The authorities arrested him, forcing him to seek employment outside the British empire.

He eventually found work with China’s Ching emperor in Manchuria where a plague was raging, eventually claiming 60,000 lives. Recognising it as pneumonic, Wu recommended use of multi-layered masks he designed to protect users against airborne infection, now recognised as forerunner of the N95 mask.

His later analysis of the socio-behavioural determinants of zoonotic transmission of the epidemic was also pioneering. Sadly, a famous French doctor Gerald Mesny, who rejected Wu’s mask advice as diagnostically wrong, died of the plague soon after arrival.

Over a century later, and over two decades after the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis exposed the systemic financial fragility creating conditions for the 2008-2009 global financial crisis, the reluctance to learn from the East continues, ignoring Prophet Muhammad’s advice to ‘seek knowledge, even unto China’.

How will Budget 2021 address well-being and recovery?

Catch this Astro Vizhuthugal interview (in English) with Jomo, conducted on 29 October 2020, about 2 weeks before the Budget was unveiled, where he observes we are simultaneously facing an economic crisis, a Covid-19 crisis and a political crisis.

He refers to many countries and states which did not resort to severe lockdown measures but relied on strong early and appropriate action, involving an All of Government approach.

Watch the full interview here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ua2BQQMV1D-kN5HzjUfl7psb72yCzKxX/view