Work on the final report of The National Economic Consultative Council on the post-1990 development policy was almost done in early 1992, when the Prime Minister launched the Malaysian Business Council (MBC) to replace the Economic Panel he had set up ten years before, which had obviously run its course by the time of the Team A-Team B clash in 1987. At the official inaugural meeting of the MBC, comprising an expanded membership but with the same structure as the Economic Panel, with representatives from the Cabinet and other government leaders, senior officials, business leaders and a few academics and think-tankers, Dr. Mahathir introduced the outlines of Vision 2020, a thirty-year national mission to achieve developed status by the end of the period. The Second Perspective Plan (1991-2000) covering the new development policy will be its first ten-year phase. Vision 2020 goes beyond economics, but set its sights on nine goals including the development of a liberal, progressive, tolerant, technologically accomplished society, and a Bangsa Malaysia as its national identity.
Nordin Sopiee, director general of ISIS, had outlined the nine challenges of Vision 2020 in a note to the UMNO Supreme Council at its previous meeting. In accepting it, Mahathir effectively managed to galvanize the imagination of the people and drew attention away from the non-fulfilment of the NEP targets by 1990. But the issue did not go away; it continued to haunt subsequent policy discussions through to Pak Lah’s administration at the start of the new millennium.
As MAPEN was wrapping up its work, a rival group of scholars, the Group of 15 (Kumpulan 15) in UKM prepared their own submission to the government for the post-NEP policy. With membership including Ishak Shaari, Ismail Salleh, Halim Ali, Osman Rani, Annuar Ali, Shamsul Amri Baharuddin, Hamzah Ismail and Rustam Sani among others, the G15 targeted explicitly the twin goals of the NEP as part of the continuing national agenda. A brief encounter between the UMNO representatives of MAPEN led by Abdullah Badawi and the G15 was organized in Dewan Bahasa and Pustaka to iron out differences in approach, but there was no real consensus even after a second dialogue at a special economic bureau meeting of the UMNO Supreme Council chaired by Anwar Ibrahim and with Daim Zainuddin present. I couldn’t help sensing a certain politically-biased rivalry emerging between the Abdullah Badawi (Ghaffar Baba)-led MAPEN team and the Anwar (Daim)-inspired G15 submission.
For my part, as director of MIER, I commissioned Jomo Sundram to put together a book on the Malaysian economy based on a series of scholarly reports that might elucidate the problems of growth and equity, to ameliorate the politically charged debate on the NEP; this was duly published two years later, after MAPEN submitted its final report to the government.
It was during the final prepatory meeting on the MAPEN Report that I received one day a call from Zainol Mahmud, director-general of the Implementation Coordination Unit (ICU) in the Prime Minister’s Department informing me that Dr. Mahathir wanted to see me. I assumed that it was about the MAPEN Report, or the fact that I had submitted to him previously a proposal to set up a Science City in the Ulu Langat area. It turned out to be neither. It was about another letter I sent him regarding an investment opportunity in Langkawi that was brought to my attention by Mark Heng and a scion of the Kuok family, Kuok Hoon Ping. This was about the government’s proposed divestment of the Langkawi Resort Hotel, the first 5-star hotel before the island got its duty-free status. Mahathir immediately put me at ease upon my entering his office, and as he is wont to do, immediately came to the point saying that he could not accede to my proposal to buy over the Langkawi resort, since he had already promised that to a Negri Sembilan royalty and their Japanese partners. There was still 19% he said I could participate in, to which I said I would only be in the minority and could not control it. He suggested to take it anyway, and perhaps later unload it for a higher price. He wanted me to learn the ropes, I guessed, but I declined and said I’d wait for another opportunity.
I must have caught the business bug while on the Boards of CIMA as well as Bank Bumiputera, learning about the travails Malay businessmen were having with their loans from Bank Bumi as a result of the 1985 recession. This urge was reinforced by conversations with the Heng family and their associates. But I didn’t fancy rearing chicken broilers or layers which different branches of the Hengs had going. I did take a position in a small 300-acre cocoa plantation in Sabah with a Heng in-law, Kuor Nam Ngum, but later liquidated my share when Comsa Farms was listed on the second board. Associating with Khadijah Ahmad, who owned and ran a stockbroking firm and a discount house, which later was incorporated into an investment bank, and seeing the exploits of my former academic friend Mokhzani Abdul Rahim whose business career I tried to emulate, and who had acquired the KFC master franchise for Malaysia from Kington Loo, it didn’t take much for me to take the next baby steps in business.
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| Tenggara Cement Plant in Pasir Gudang |
So, when Mark mentioned that there might be an opportunity to buy over the Pasir Gudang grinding plant of Kedah Cement Berhad (KCB), whose main factory is located in Langkawi, I jumped at the idea, maybe because of my previous exposure to CIMA. The KCB board had considered the grinding plant in Johore surplus to their plans to expand as part of their listing exercise. Thus, I wrote again to Mahathir to be given another stab at business and to seek his support for my bid to purchase the Kedah Cement clinker grinding plant. Mahathir sent Rim Keh Mei, a director of KCB, to see me, who tried to persuade me that if I have access to funds to purchase the grinding plant, why not just put them into the ACU, the money market fund, that I might do better. He did not know yet that I had no clue where to get hold of the funds to buy the cement plant, but I was not persuaded by his argument, and insisted on going ahead with the purchase of the plant in Johore, confident that I might make a go of the cement business for which I know something about. I named my company Tenggara Cement (after the name Johor Cement was turned down by ROC), and the rest as they say is history.
I must have been a restless soul, for paralleling the cement plant acquisition, I was already thinking of another venture. Saidi Hashim, a kindred spirit in business ideas, who was still in the medical school in USM for many years after I had left, kept in touch with me about proposals to undertake this government health procurement contract or that, including the supply of x-ray films. But one business idea I discussed with him couldn’t be dismissed off hand.
I had mentioned earlier about submitting to Mahathir a proposal for the establishment of a science city. A year before that in 1991 on a trip to Melbourne, Mal Logan then already VC of Monash University, had referred me to Australia’s Multi-Function Polis (MFP) project in Australia patterned after the French science city, Sophia Antilles in Nice, which was won by Adelaide in the competiton among Australian cities to host the Australian version. This was a time when many countries were trying to emulate and reproduce the success of Silicon Valley by establishing technology parks in the drive for world-beating technology. At the same time, Monash itself, under Logan’s expansion plans which included acquisition of Victoria state polytechnics, was considering locating a branch campus in Kuala Lumpur, whose ongoing negotiations were being conducted by Michael Yeoh of ASLI on behalf of the Sunway Group. The idea of a Malaysian version like the MFP, or the Tsukuba Science City, involving co-locating a university or two with a number of research institutes, together with advanced R&D manufacturing companies, in an environment that combined work-living-and-leisure activities, became a model for many initiatives a few years further forward, including our own Multi-media Super Corridor. I developed the idea of a Malaysian Science city with Saidi after identifying Ulu Langat Forest Reserve, in the area where I had conducted my undergraduate field research, as a possible site near Kuala Lumpur. I had then worked with Muhaimin and his Arkitek Bersekutu Group to produce a masterplan for the Ulu Langat Science City project. On completion I then sent the masterplan document to Mahathir. After sometime, in fact on the day of the official handover of the MAPEN final report, I received word through Aziz Ismail, the PM’s principal private secretary, that Mahathir liked the proposal and told me to develop the idea further.
While discussing the MFP project with Lee Hobba, who had after graduation become a contractor to Austrade Education to recruit foreign students to Australian universities, and another Australian businessman who was keen to sell ambulances to our Ministry of Health, we struck on the idea of expanding the twinning programme which Malaysia had pioneered ten years earlier and now blossoming in the 90s as demand for overseas tertiary education especially to Australia expanded. An Aussie university to be located in the proposed Malaysian Science city could prepare students that Lee would be able to place in Monash or any other Australian universities and colleges.
Saidi and I decided that a medical twinning programme, a harder option, would be a worthwhile proposition in view of the rising cost of tuition overseas. Our model, which became the germ of an idea to establish the International Medical College (IMC), was the reverse to the one that Khalid Kadir and Mustafa Embong, both Monash medical alumni, then well ensconced in UKM medical faculty, where they proposed to establish, at first with Monash, but later switched to University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, a clinical school attached to the Ipoh General Hospital, to be funded by Genting, whose graduates would be awarded a Newcastle MBBS after spending their first three pre-clinical studies at the university’s UK campus. Our medical education twinning model is the reverse where students would undertake their pre-clinical studies here in Malaysia and then would go on to a partner medical school overseas to complete their medical training and be awarded the respective partner university’s medical degree. While there are merits to both model pedagogically, though IMC’s curriculum was based an integrated medical program like in USM’s medical school, the choice of IMC’s degree structure was based more on an economic proposition to take advantage of the then prevailing excess clinical capacity in UK medical schools and elsewhere where additional places might be offered on a marginal cost basis on top of the overseas student quota for each university. For Malaysian students, there would be savings from both the tuition fees as well as accommodation costs while staying home in the first half of their studies before going overseas.
The IMC project, conceived in 1990, two years before the MIER conference on private education in Malaysia, was officially launched in April 1991 by the then Minister of Health, Suleiman Daud, with five partners signed up, namely, Dundee University, Toronto, Newcastle, Liverpool medical schools and the Royal College of Surgeons Ireland. We leased the former Sunway College campus in Petaling Jaya which also had a MARA student hostel attached to it. After nearly two years of conceptualization, lobbying for the college licence, curriculum planning and recruitment of lecturers, IMC as the first private medical school in Malaysia opened its doors to its first intake in November 1992.
I was still not done yet with MIER; in fact there was no inkling of any winding down of my research and policy activities. But it was apparent that research for the post-NEP economic policy had occupied much of the last two years of my term as head of MIER, and would turn out to be the last serious work I did while in the Institute. Zainal Aznam and I wrote an expanded paper based on my post-1990 economic alternatives for Malaysia, and building on the Income Doubling Plan first announced in the 1991 National Outlook Conference. The paper was presented to the Third Bumiputera Economic Congress organized by the Malay Chamber of Commerce and Industry in 1993, in which MIER was part of the technical support committee. There, both of us floated the idea of an “economic zakat” which government-controlled companies would contribute annually. When this idea was presented by Mustafa Mohamed through Daim, who was then UMNO Treasurer, to the UMNO Supreme Council, Mahathir shot it down. Later the idea was resurrected by Mohammed Ali Hashim, then CEO of Johore State Development Corporation, who promoted it as part of his “jihad business” in the form of the corporate wakaf proposition.
In what would turn out to be my last hectic year in MIER, events outside my control took a momentous turn. I had some hint of it when Tamrin Ghaffar, the deputy prime minister’s son, remarked in conversation among the UMNO MAPEN group that I was due for a "promotion". Political talk among UMNO Bagan Serai grassroots in 1990 had led to me being invited back by some local faction to “look see” in the local division; I consulted with Aziz Shamsuddin, then political secretary to the Prime Minister and an old political acquaintance during my USM days, who suggested that I checked around Semanggol as the political wind was swirling towards the 1990 General Elections. Talk then was that I was being rumoured as a possible candidate for Bagan Serai parliamentary seat. Nothing came of it, I was not “banjar” enough, as Tan Sri Basir Ismail said. The 1990 general elections came and went, Ghani Osman retained his parliamentary seat and Malik Munip won a state seat in Johore. My MAPEN drafting committee members, Fong Chan Onn and T. Marimuthu, both former academics, won parliamentary seats respectively for the MCA and MIC.
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| Kamal Salih on the Cover of Visa Gold Magazine |
So, I went about my business in MIER as usual. I even managed to write a weekly economic column for the New Straits Times for two years over 1992-93. Then one day in early 1993, while in the office I received a call from Hashim Yaacob from USM, who had finally left the university after the staff association demonstrations in 1985. He asked me how about the idea of contesting for a seat in the upcoming UMNO Supreme Council elections. I knew that it was not his idea; it was later when I was introduced to Major Salleh, the PM’s special officer, and meeting with Hussein Ahmad (who was called affectionately as “Ayah 'Sein”), the UMNO Information Bureau chief, that I found out that I was being sponsored together with Mustafa Mohamed to contest for a seat in the Council at the behest of Dr. Mahathir himself. That was the beginning of another history beyond MIER.
As if to mark the separation of my MIER years and what was to come after, in business or in politics, or in my life going forward, I was interviewed and featured in the June/July 1993 issue of Standard Chartered’s Visa Gold magazine, under the title "Cement and Mortarboards", recounting my life up to that point in academia and business. I had just turned 47, and I was winding up to wind down a most satisfying period of my life in MIER.
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