LAUNCHING OF THE BOOK: NOTES TO THE PRIME MINISTER

Sumber: EPU
Tarikh: 02/06/11 (All day)
Lokasi:
MUTIARA CROWNE PLAZA HOTEL,KL

LAUNCHING OF THE BOOK: NOTES TO THE PRIME MINISTER - THE UNTOLD STORY OF HOW MALAYSIA BEAT THE CURRENCY SPECULATORS.

SPEECH OF

TAN SRI NOR MOHAMED YAKCOP

MUTIARA CROWNE PLAZA HOTEL

KUALA LUMPUR

2 JUNE 2011

Ladies and Gentlemen,
I would like to thank all present for taking time off from your tight schedules to be here this morning. And I would like to join everyone in this hall in praying for Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad‟s continued good health, as well as for the good health of Tun Dr. Siti Hasmah Mohd Ali and their family members.

2. On occasions such as this, it is traditional to thank all those who have contributed to the outcome. First, of course, comes the family, my wife Fawziah and the three kids, Nazir, Ridzuan and Khairul Anwar, for their unrelenting support. Apart from the immediate family, I‟ve been blessed with other family members, friends and colleagues, who have made a difference in my life. In the case of the launch of this book, certainly Dato Wong Sulong and Dato Ng Tieh Chuan played a major role. I wish to thank them. But beyond the book, there are just too many names to mention today, who have made a significant difference in my life. However, I would like to take this opportunity to mention three persons, two of whom are not with us here today.

3. The first is my beloved mother, Raihan Bibi Binti Syed, who passed away some eleven years ago. She brought me up as a single mother, since I was eleven years old, under very difficult circumstances. Everything I am I owe to her. She died a few days before I was officially appointed as the Economic Advisor to the Prime Minister, but she knew I was working for Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, and she was extremely proud that I was assisting a great leader.

4. The other person is Tan Sri Jaaffar Hussein, who was my mentor in Bank Negara Malaysia. He was a brilliant yet humble man, and I am extremely happy that Puan Sri Rohila and her three children have accepted my invitation to attend this function.

5. The third person I would like to thank, who is here with us today, is a former senior aide who has worked tirelessly with me for eleven long years from 2000 to 2010. He is the person whom I relied upon, not only to get things done, but also for his almost uncanny ability to see the light at the end of every dark tunnel. During good days and bad, he was the perpetual optimist, who kept me going, even during days when dark clouds replaced blue skies. Ladies and gentlemen, please give a big hand to Johan Mahmood Merican. I wish Johan all the best in his new appointment as the CEO of Talent Corporation. Johan‟s role as my senior aide has now been replaced by another dedicated officer, Wan Murtadza Wan Mahmud, whose mother Puan Sahidah Bahar Rasip is also here with us today.
Ladies and Gentlemen,

6. The book that is launched today began with two phone calls. The first, on September 29, 1997, was from Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad to Tan Sri Abdul Aziz Ismail, his Principal Private Secretary, requesting him to contact me. The second phone call, on the same day, was Tan Sri Aziz informing me of Tun Dr Mahathir‟s message: that I have been summoned to meet Tun Dr Mahathir in Buenos Aires, Argentina on October 2, 1997. I went home almost immediately, packed my bags and informed my family that I was leaving for Argentina to meet a very important personality. My family wanted to know who I was going to meet. I told them Dr Mahathir. My wife was excited, but my children were disappointed. “Dad”, they chimed in unison, “We thought you were going to Argentina to meet Maradona !”

7. Apart from my family, only two close friends knew of my intended visit to Argentina. The first was Tan Sri Zainuddin Maidin, who declined my invitation to join me on the trip. Instead he gave me a long letter to hand over to Tun Dr. Mahathir. The other is David Leong. I am happy both of them are here today.
Ladies and Gentlemen,

8. Lenin famously said “Sometimes decades pass and nothing happens. At other times, weeks pass and decades happen.” In 1997, we saw decades of hard work in developing our nation destroyed in a few months. This book is a record of some aspects of the crisis and how we, as a nation, rose to the occasion and beat the speculators. I believe this is an important historical document.

9. We learn in history that sometimes the lives of individuals and the fate of nations hinge on a millimetre‟s difference in the trajectory of a bullet, a road not taken in a whim, or the random stray of a shrapnel. 5

10. In my case, my fate was sealed, not by the trajectory of a bullet, but by the turn of a head – Tun Dr Mahathir‟s head. Let me explain. It was a sunny afternoon, in September 1997, when the Prime Minister‟s motorcade was speeding along the streets of Kuala Lumpur. At one junction, as the motorcade slowed, Tun Dr Mahathir turned his head to look out. And he saw a forlorn-looking man walking towards a row of shops for lunch.

11. That forlorn-looking man was me! A few days later, the Prime Minister left for an official visit to Cuba, Chile and Argentina. In Cuba, the image of the man appeared before Tun Dr Mahathir. And he made a phone call. The rest, as they say, is history.

12. Often times I had wondered, what if I had postponed lunch that fateful afternoon? What if the Prime Minister‟s car arrived at that junction a minute later? Well, these are idle thoughts, really. History happens. And there is no undoing of what is done. The important point is that every crisis demands statesmanship, which cannot be composed of calculations alone, but must also reach for the unquenchable in the human spirit. This is what Tun Dr Mahathir did in 1997/98. Even in the darkest hours, he gave us hope.

13. In Greek mythology, when Pandora opened her box, she let out all evils, except one: hope. The Greeks considered hope dangerous, its bedfellows can be delusion. Nietzsche, the German philosopher, later saw hope as the evil that prolongs human torment. But, in the end, Pandora opened the box again and released hope, because, without hope, humanity was filled with despair. 6

14. As we move forward, with hope in our hearts, on our journey towards Vision 2020, we ought never to minimise the nature of the challenges that will continue to confront us along the way. However, learning from the 1997/98 crisis, we ought never to underestimate our ability to deal with them.
Ladies and Gentlemen,

15. I had wanted to publish the Notes earlier, encouraged by many friends, including Tan Sri Arumugam, who is with us today, but I kept putting it off, not convinced that anyone would care to read it. One day, I handed the set of Notes to my friend, Dr Nungsari Ahmad Radhi to read. He turned up at my office the next day, all excited and said I had no choice but to publish the Notes, as the Notes provide an important intellectual aspect for the 1998 Unorthodox Measures. Things moved quickly after that. I got Tun Dr Mahathir‟s blessing to publish the Notes and persuaded my friend Dato‟ Wong Sulong to edit it. With Dato‟ Ng Tieh Chuan of MPH embarking on publishing this book with such enthusiasm, we quickly arrived at this launching date.

16. The first Note, among the 45 Notes published in this book, was written in the Alvear Palace Hotel in Buenos Aires on the night of October 2, 1997 on an empty stomach. Why empty stomach? I had met Tun Dr Mahathir at his suite at the Alvear Palace Hotel on October 2, 1997 at 5pm, immediately upon his arrival from Chile. He asked me to explain to him what was happening in the financial markets, particularly the 7 forex market. He said that he had two hours; the briefing had to end at 7pm for him to freshen up for dinner arranged by the Malaysian ambassador to Argentina.

17. For two hours I explained to Tun Dr Mahathir how the financial market, particularly the forex market, works. He hardly said a word. He stopped me at 7pm. He asked me what I was doing for the night. I told Tun Dr Mahathir that I was also invited to the dinner by the ambassador. He said “No, you are not going for that dinner. You go back to your room and put in writing what you had been telling me for the last two hours, and see me at 7am tomorrow.” I skipped dinner, went to my room, started writing the report, finished it just before 7am the next day, and went straight to see Tun Dr Mahathir and passed him the report. Tun Dr Mahathir read it carefully; his face brightened up and he said “Now I understand how the forex market works.”

18. There was another note that I wrote later, where I attempted to explain to the Prime Minister various terms used in the financial market. One such term was KLIBOR, which stands for Kuala Lumpur Interbank Offer Rate, which is the daily index reflecting the money market conditions. I explained to Tun Dr Mahathir that, originally, we had wanted to name the index Malaysia Interbank Offer Rate or MIBOR in short. However, one member of the committee explained to us that the BOR in Hokkien means wife. MIBOR, therefore, may mean my wife. We, of course, did not want the world to think that wives are traded in the interbank money market in Malaysia. Worse, if they are traded at a discount ! Therefore, we chose the term KLIBOR instead of MIBOR. 8

19. The last sentence in the book that is launched today is the closing sentence in my article written on the occasion of Tun Dr Mahathir‟s retirement at the end of October 2003. It reads “Certainly, a man like Tun Dr Mahathir is not born every day.” Indeed, coming to think about it, a man like Tun Dr Mahathir is not born but made – made in the difficult school of hard knocks and changing circumstances, made in the context of seeing his people subject to the humiliation of colonial rule. And, when given the authority, Tun Dr Mahathir successfully transformed Malaysia to the modern, high middle income economy that it is today.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

20. I would like to point out a strange irony in the timing of this publication. These Notes, which were written in 1997/1998, contributed to the implementation of what came to be termed as the Unorthodox Measures. Why Unorthodox? As Tan Sri Lin See Yan explained in a recent article, events set in motion in the West since 1983, had by 1997, enshrined free capital movement and floating exchange rates as a global objective for the IMF. It first started in the European Union in the late 1980s, and eventually, at the IMF, under French socialist CEO Michel Camdessus, it became the standard orthodoxy. In Hong Kong, at its 1997 Annual Meeting, the IMF under Camdessus was pushing hard to ensure that no nation attempted to move away from this orthodoxy of free flow of capital, despite the brewing East Asia crisis. 9

21. Some 13 years later, speaking in Asia in 2011, another French socialist CEO of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, distanced himself from this orthodoxy of free capital flow. Dominique Strauss-Kahn said “Capital controls can also play a role, especially where the surge in capital flows is expected to be temporary, or where exchange rate overshoot is a real danger.”

22. The irony is this: In 1998, the measures that we undertook were, by definition, unorthodox. Today, as this book is being launched, the IMF has changed its stance, and our 1998 measures, based on today‟s definition, may no longer be considered as unorthodox. In 1998, Malaysia was certainly well ahead of the curve - 13 years ahead of the IMF, to be exact.
Ladies and Gentlemen,

23. The unorthodox way of doing things is still with us. Today, our Prime Minister, Dato‟ Sri Najib Tun Razak has embarked on a major transformational agenda, which is unorthodox in nature. He has firmly put in place national re-engineering initiatives, through the Economic Transformation Plan (ETP) and the Government Transformation Programme (GTP), to transform Malaysia into a high-value and high-income nation by 2020.

24. Datuk Sri Najib‟s motto on taking over as Prime Minister was „1Malaysia: People First, Performance Now‟, reflecting his philosophy and aspiration that the main 10
beneficiaries of development must be the rakyat at large. He has, within two years, successfully ensured that everyone is on board on the national transformation agenda, and we are now seeing the results being delivered.

25. I have no doubt that, under the dynamic leadership of Dato‟ Sri Najib, and given his deep-rooted sense of purpose, as well as an unwavering commitment to the cause, our beloved nation will continue to march forward towards greater prosperity for all.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

26. On behalf of Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, who could not make it for this function, I would like to launch the book written by Wong Sulong entitled: Notes to the Prime Minister – The untold story of how Malaysia beat the currency speculators. Thank you.