How long does it take to build a nation that is governed by good governance in all sphere for the citizen? After the tragic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan managed the quick resumption of services due to its people’s effort and help from large numbers of volunteers. I read that Hiroshima received a lot of help from people in neighboring towns and cities such as Fuchu, Kure, and even Yamaguchi. In this sense, the response was similar to that seen after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, when many people throughout Japan went to the devastated areas and helped the victims. How many times Japan was hit by a calamity and rebounded? How long did they take to build their resilience and bounce back? These are some of the questions I wish to pose to my fellow Malaysians. Instead, can we as Malaysians proudly say that after 64 years that we have the symptoms of a successful nation in all spheres? Malaysia is rooted with blessings unlike Japan and other countries who suffers calamities trailing mass destructions to their livelihood. I remember studying history and the early days merchants from India were right to name Malaysia as “Swarnabumi”, a golden land. What is lacking now? I personally believe, we lack at taking matters or addressing issues from a root cause standpoint and doing so superficially at symptomatic level.

In Malaysia we suffer from a syndrome called “instant symptomacited”. This is my terminology to address an excitement over a symptom in an instant manner and thereafter the excitement frizzles off over a period of 100 days. Beyond that, everything is forgotten without retrospection of the root cause that perpetuated the symptom.

When I left the corporate world, I took the opportunity to author my maiden book, “A+B=C, Student’s Guide for Building Character”. The book took birth to put my then 24 years of human resource real work experiences to observe issues such as absenteeism, tardiness, harassments and other omissions by employees that affected overall productivity. Until today, most corporation are unable to achieve real throughput due to these omissions of their employees. Companies work at symptoms without knowing that the root cause of these issues are from the behavior of their employees rooted in their habits. Companies then spend huge training hours trying to alter these behaviors and create various rules, regulations and procedures hoping to see real habit changes from these instant modifiers. The end result is still the same as we use the instant symptomacited method. If we take a serious look, then these issues are actually rooted in schools. Give this a thought, aren’t schools having the same disciplinary issues? The difference is that in corporations they are addressed by the human resource practitioners and in schools by a designated disciplinary teacher. Hence, the misconduct symptoms in corporations, has its root cause in schools. Corporations should channel their Corporate Social Responsibility or CSR spending towards schools in transforming students’ habits to enable corporation to enjoy corporate governance and achieve true productivity.

The same should be the approach for nation building. Remember that our heart is a good fertilizer, where anything we plant whether love, hate, fear, hope, revenge etc. will surely grow and bear fruits. Therefore, we as a nation, have to decide the kind of fertilizer used to have a good harvest from the hearts of our citizens. This is the time we need to closely retrospect, what caused these symptoms until today, we are more divided than united, complaining than complementing, suspect than respect each other and etc., culminating on the verge of having vengeance rather than building a true nation on our strength of unity to celebrate our diversity. Heartening to know that the recently launched National Unity Policy 2021-2030 has most of the ingredients to unite us but void of one main ingredient to make it a perfect unity concoction. That ingredient is the word “acceptance” but what is mostly mentioned is “tolerance”. Closely introspect the word tolerance or in Bahasa Malaysia, “tolak ansur” meaning someone pushes (tolak) slowly and surely and the other progressively moves (ansur) backwards only to be pushed to a corner in some point in time. When the other hits the corner, they have two choices, either condone or retaliate, that is the symptom of tolerance. Clearly when a child cries, as parents we pacify and tolerate the child’s whining by giving the child a toy, only to have the child stop crying for the moment and later doing the same. The crying is a symptom met with a toy as the probable root cause to solve the crying. Hence, if Malaysia wishes to see her citizens united, then it must be rooted in acceptance of her forty ethnicities diversity and celebrating each of them.

For a start, let us work on the power of one. I request all fellow Malaysians to work on one symptom and study its root cause. If possible, work with your local council and other representatives in providing a conclusive solution towards it. Slowly but surely, we will see better resolutions towards our daily issues. Here I provide two examples of how to act and address issues from a root cause perspective rather than reacting on the symptom.

a) Take the symptom of installing loud exos sound from vehicles. The government needs to find the root cause. If there is enforcement, where these exos pipes are totally banned from being manufactured or imported, then the authorities would save time on issuance of summons to those who have fitted this exos and help free the courts from spending time to impose punishments.

b) Increasing the fine of non-compliance to the SOP from RM1,000 to RM10,000 is a symptom. The root cause, as Malaysians we fail to inculcate good habits to practice diligence in following SOPs or the leaders introducing such penalties, don’t walk the talk. Habits surpass rules and regulation as modifiers of behavior. For a start, instead of a hefty fine, get the recalcitrant without double standards practice to do community work at the hospital. In doing so, it will help the recalcitrant to see, reflect his wrong doings and develop empathy. A change in his habit is much more impactful than an imposition of fine. What we are trying to achieve is to confine and contain the issue at the spur of the moment without real behavioral change of the nation. Then again, these behaviors are best changed in schools, that is a better root cause approach.

Apart from the above, there are host of other symptoms, such as the mushrooming of old folks’ homes, homeless citizens, illegal entrance into the country, annual floods, illegal dumping, unsparing contamination of rivers, filthy public amenities and restaurant washrooms and etc. The list is never ending.

My earnest take, if we really wish to see most of these issues resolved to a large extent, although eradicating them totally is a far vision, then the root cause approach will be to disrupt the current education system. Just like Japan after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we need to take an attitude to restart from stretch our rebuilding efforts. Let us as Malaysians volunteer to help the government in such efforts. I am sure, if we cohesively work and accept our respective strengths, then these symptoms could be easily uprooted with a firmer action for more positive outcomes.

Remember that no sophisticated weapons are required to destroy a nation. All that is needed is to lower the quality of a country’s education system. What are the symptoms? Patients die at the hands of such doctors. Buildings collapses at the hands of such engineers. Money is drained from accountants of a company or economist of a country. Humanity will slowly regress at the thoughts of religious scholars; justice perishes at the hands of such judges and its negative effects continue spiraling downwards. Hence, a nation’s collapse is rooted in an ill education system. That is where we will need to root our actions! And we need to act fast. Education is the only vehicle to progress and the end of this education is always character. Once character is well rooted, it provides the symptom of well-developed DNA (Developing Natural Attributes) such as love rather than hate. pardoning than vengeance, uphold promise than compromise on trust, admire every citizen’s success rather than breed jealousy, curse none rather to pray for all, have generosity rather than feeding on greed and able to earn an honest livelihood rather than succumb to the act of bribery.

(Asohan Satkunasingham is an author, progressive human resources practitioner, high impact corporate teacher and Chairman of Persatuan Usahasama Perkembangan Ukhuwah (PUPUK)