YOU would not board an aircraft knowing the pilot had never been trained to fly, entrust your heart to somebody who had never studied medicine, or ask an enthusiastic amateur to design a bridge simply because he was popular.
Yet when it comes to politics, where decisions can affect millions of lives and billions of ringgit, we sometimes behave as though popularity, eloquence and the ability to win votes are qualifications enough.
That contradiction has bothered political thinkers for more than two thousand years, and Plato’s Socrates famously compared governing with specialised expertise, including the knowledge required to navigate a ship. The underlying question remains uncomfortable today. If knowledge matters when steering a vessel through dangerous waters, why should knowledge suddenly become optional when steering a country?
Think about Malaysia for a moment, particularly the increasingly complicated business of government involving economics, constitutional law, technology, energy security, healthcare, education and climate change. An elected representative need not be an expert in everything, obviously, but surely someone seeking the authority to legislate should understand how government works.
Perhaps it is time to think outside the box and ask whether aspiring politicians should undergo a compulsory course before becoming eligible to contest an election. Give them one year covering the Federal Constitution, MA63 and parliamentary procedure, among others.
A candidate would not have to prove that he is religious, liberal, socialist or nationalist; he would merely demonstrate that he understands the machinery he is asking voters to allow him to operate.
Batu Lintang PBB information chief Hadzman Johny believes there should be a basic competency requirement for candidates seeking elected office. It should not be about academic qualifications alone, but whether a candidate has sufficient knowledge and understanding of governance, the Constitution, public administration, etc.
“Being elected to public office carries significant responsibilities and affects the lives of many people. Therefore, candidates should demonstrate a minimum level of knowledge and competency before being entrusted with that responsibility,” says Hadzman.
Immediately somebody will shout it’s undemocratic! Fair enough, because any proposal restricting eligibility for elected office raises legitimate questions about equality, representation and who gets to decide what constitutes sufficient political knowledge.
But asking the question itself is not undemocratic, because democracies constantly establish qualifications, rules and disqualifications governing public office.
The more interesting question is whether competence should become part of that conversation, without allowing examinations to become instruments for excluding inconvenient candidates. That safeguard is crucial because history teaches us that any test controlled by political authorities can potentially become a gate through which friends are admitted and opponents conveniently rejected.
Socrates’ ancient warning deserves attention because democracy possesses a vulnerability that has not disappeared with modern education, television or the internet. A person skilled at persuasion can sound knowledgeable without necessarily possessing knowledge, and Plato worried that democratic politics could reward expertise in winning popular support instead of expertise in governing well.
That observation sounds remarkably contemporary when political messages can be reduced to slogans, viral videos and emotional appeals.
Malaysia has another complication we should be willing to discuss openly, which is, political appeals can sometimes be framed around race and religion, subjects powerful enough to overwhelm sober discussion about policy. When identity and emotion dominate an election campaign, voters risk spending more time asking who a politician represents culturally than whether that politician understands economics, administration or legislation.
That does not mean ordinary voters are foolish, nor does it justify taking their votes away. Political equality remains fundamental to democracy, but equality of citizenship does not magically make every citizen, or every politician, equally knowledgeable about every complicated question confronting government.
To me, this distinction matters because one person, one vote expresses equality of political rights, not equality of expertise. The professor of economics and someone who has never studied economics possess the same vote, as they should in a democracy, although obviously their technical understanding of monetary policy may differ enormously.
We should ask whether election candidates should first demonstrate a reasonable understanding of the job they desperately want.
And yes, let us throw an even more provocative question onto the table: should aspiring election candidates sit a competency test? My answer is that intelligence certainly matters, but a competency score alone would be a dangerously crude passport to political office because intelligence without integrity can merely produce a clever rogue.
A brilliant politician can still be arrogant, dishonest, insensitive or hopeless at understanding ordinary people. Leadership requires judgment, emotional intelligence, character, discipline, communication, courage and the ability to absorb expert advice, which cannot sensibly be reduced to a single number produced by an intelligence test.
This brings us to Canadian political theorist Daniel A. Bell and his writings about political meritocracy in China. Bell has examined a tradition in which officials were historically selected through examinations and subsequently assessed through performance, while stressing that there remains a substantial gap between the meritocratic ideal and political reality in contemporary China.
Bell’s argument is interesting not because Malaysia should copy China as we have entirely different political institutions, but because it challenges the assumption that elections and merit must somehow be competing ideas. Why cannot a democracy retain the people’s absolute right to choose while expecting everyone presenting himself for that choice to acquire basic governing knowledge first?
Imagine candidates entering an election after studying constitutional government, parliamentary rules, economics, budgeting, ethics and Malaysia’s federal structure. Campaigns might still be noisy, personalities would still clash and politicians would certainly continue promising the bulan, but at least nobody could plead ignorance about the difference between constitutional authority and campaign rhetoric.
There would be difficulties, of course, beginning with who designs the curriculum, who conducts the examination and how poorer candidates find time for a year of study. Any credible system would therefore require independent administration, accessible courses, reasonable costs and safeguards preventing educational requirements from becoming barriers favouring wealthy or privileged Malaysians.
There is also a powerful democratic counterargument: voters themselves should judge competence, and bad politicians can be removed at the next election. That principle deserves respect, because transferring too much authority from voters to examiners could create another problem, which is, an unelected class effectively deciding who is permitted to enter democratic politics.
Perhaps, therefore, the real lesson from Socrates is not that democracy should be abandoned or that clever people should automatically rule everyone else. It is that political power is too important to treat governing knowledge as an optional accessory while demanding rigorous preparation from doctors, engineers, accountants, lawyers, pilots and practically everybody else entrusted with serious responsibility.
Malaysia does not need philosopher-kings, and certainly nobody should imagine that possessing certificates automatically makes a person wise. What Malaysia could profitably debate is whether those seeking the privilege of writing our laws should first prove that they understand those laws and the institutions they hope to lead.
We examine people before allowing them to drive cars, fly aircraft, practise medicine and perform countless jobs carrying responsibility for others. Asking why there is no comparable foundation of preparation for those seeking political power is not an attack on democracy; it is a question about how democracy might demand more from the people asking citizens to entrust them with a nation.
I have a question: Should the most persuasive person necessarily be trusted with the plane simply because the passengers applaud the loudest?
Before we answer that question, perhaps every aspiring ‘pilot’ should at least learn how the aircraft works.
The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune. The writer can be reached at rajlira@gmail.com
