30/08/2026
MERDEKA IS AN UNFINISHED PROJECT
As we celebrate 69 years of Merdeka and 63 years of Malaysia, I have been thinking about what it actually means for a country to become independent. We often speak about 31 August 1957 as though it represents the completion of something: the British left, the Federation of Malaya became independent, and the people of the country finally took control of their own destiny. But perhaps we should see Merdeka differently. Independence was not the completion of the making of a nation. It was the moment when the responsibility for making that nation became ours.
The Malaysia we inhabit today is not the Malaysia of 1957, nor is it the Malaysia that came into being in 1963. The country has changed enormously. Our cities have expanded, our economy has transformed, our pop**ation has changed, our institutions have evolved and our relationship with the natural environment has been altered, sometimes irreversibly. Some of those changes have made Malaysia a better place. Others have taken us further away from the aspirations that accompanied our independence and the formation of Malaysia.
That is why I think Merdeka should not only be about remembering what previous generations achieved. It should also be about asking ourselves what we are making of the inheritance they left us.
Every generation inherits a country that has already been shaped by those who came before. We inherit its achievements, its institutions, its cultures and its landscapes, but we also inherit its unfinished business. We inherit inequalities that have not been resolved, divisions that have not been healed, institutions that may need strengthening, and natural systems that may already have been damaged. Our responsibility is not to blindly preserve everything we inherited simply because it came from the past. Our responsibility is to understand what is worth preserving, what needs to be reformed, what needs to be protected and what needs to be restored.
This is where I think the idea of placemaking becomes particularly relevant. We often think of placemaking as creating something new: building a public space, revitalising a neighbourhood, developing a town or restoring a river. But good placemaking is not always about building. Sometimes it is about repairing what has been damaged. Sometimes it is about recovering something that we allowed to disappear. Sometimes it is about reconnecting people with a place from which they have become disconnected.
The same principle applies to a nation.
We can restore a river. We can restore a wetland. We can restore a historic building. We can restore a degraded landscape. And perhaps we can also restore things that are less tangible but equally important: public trust, institutional integrity, democratic norms, social cohesion and a sense of belonging to a common country.
Restoration is therefore not a sign of failure. It is an acknowledgement that places, communities and nations can be damaged, and that we have a responsibility to repair them.
We should also remember that Malaysia does not belong only to those of us who happen to be alive today. The forests, rivers, coastlines, mountains, biodiversity and cultural heritage that we inherited are not ours to consume entirely during our own lifetime. Nor are the institutions and freedoms that previous generations struggled to establish ours to weaken without consequence. We are temporary custodians of a country that we will eventually hand to people who have not yet been born.
That raises a rather simple question: what Malaysia are we going to hand to them?
When Malaysia reaches 100 years after Merdeka in 2057, the people who are young today will be the generation looking back at the decisions we made in this period. Will they say that we protected the things that mattered? That we strengthened democracy and the rule of law? That we made meaningful progress towards social justice and equity? That we found a way to allow our different ethnic and religious identities to flourish without turning citizenship into a hierarchy of belonging? That we respected the constitutional foundations of the Federation? That we protected Sabah and Sarawak’s place within Malaysia? That we stopped treating our natural heritage as disposable? That we restored the rivers, forests and ecosystems that had been degraded before our time?
Or will they look back and ask why we knew what was happening and still chose not to act?
This is why I don’t think Merdeka should simply be measured by how far we have travelled from 1957. We should also measure it by where we are going. The past tells us where we came from, but it does not determine where we must end up. Every generation has the ability to change the direction of the country.
Merdeka is therefore not an achievement that belongs only to the past. It is a responsibility that belongs to every generation.
We are all placemakers. Every decision we make about our institutions, our communities, our economy, our cities, our rivers and our natural heritage changes the place that we will eventually leave behind.
Malaysia is unfinished.
And that is not necessarily a failure. A nation, like a living place, is never truly finished. It is continually being made and remade by the people who inhabit it.
The question is whether we will be good enough custodians to leave it better than we found it.
That, to me, is what Merdeka should mean.
