The impossible dream: How and why Mahathir’s Vision 2020 failed

My secondary school essays about Wawasan 2020 were packed with a whole load of nonsense.

Aged 15 in 1991, when then prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s plan for a developed Malaysia got hastily added to the syllabus just before exams, all I cared about was giving my teachers what they wanted - and end every essay with a couple of lines about how we needed to be united to become truly developed.

I can’t say I believed most of what I wrote. But if there was one thing I knew even back then, it was that Malaysians weren’t united. And we weren’t all equal.

My family wasn’t rolling in it. But neither were we poor. Both my parents were civil service clerks who owned a car and their own home. And in 1990s Malaysia, that meant we had enough for me not to qualify for free textbooks.

I had, however, many friends whose lives weren’t like mine. Did Dr M’s vision of a developed Malaysia mean they and their families would be taken care of? If it did, perhaps this was a vision worth working towards.

30 years on, unfortunately, reality paints a vastly different picture to the one many of us, perhaps even Mahathir himself, envisioned when Wawasan, or Vision, 2020 first entered the public lexicon.

Pass or fail

Yes, Covid-19 has indeed done a number on the country, resulting in a battered GDP and the worst unemployment figures in decades. Even so, it wasn’t exactly sunshine and roses before the pandemic, with one report in the months leading up to 2020 highlighting how poverty remained a way of life for a fifth of Malaysians.

That being the case, would it be fair to say the vision failed...