30% is ` NEP
I am telling my fellow Malays not to be taken in by this argument that if the 30% rule on equity participation is done away with, the Malays are lost. There will no longer be protection.
We need to ask ourselves, who protect us? If we are children, our parents do. If we are adults, we pull ourselves using our own bootstraps.
This argument that if the 30% is removed, we are lost is all hogwash. If you are a farmer, pak tani, penoreh getah, this talk about 30% is all Greek to them. You would be more concern if the price of your rubber scraps is ok; you will be more concern if the title to the small plot of land on which you have been working since 1970 will be granted to you. You will be concerned whether your children will be able to go to school, get financial assistance, books on loan, and after graduation, will they be able to get jobs. That 30%? It's of no concern to you.
You are more concern with an administration that works. Your land application which you sent 5 years ago hasn't been answered. You go to the land office and inquire, you are stonewalled. That's more of concern for you. You want to know why big companies are allowed land to cultivate oil palm but you aren't. If the oversupply argument applies to you it should also apply on big planters. Indeed more so. You need and want to know, whether the government is serious about combating corruption. If it does, you would like too see ex mb's, ex ministers, ex top government officers sent to jail for a few years. Then you will accept that the government is indeed serious.
Therefore, over and above the 30% thing, you are more concern to have an administration that is efficient, clean and dedicated and an economic policy that places wealth creating assets directly into your hands. Of course you are concerned if the abolition of the 30% rule is replaced with another wool over the eyes of a policy favouring the elite Malays.
You understand if that 30% is not secured, those lumpen aristocrats, the well connected will never be able to survive. You, like the majority of Malays, want capacity building, you want like what Amartya Sen says – development as freedom. You want economic freedom to get social and political liberation. Those surviving on the 30% thing, all they want are continuation of dependency.
The NEP was supposed to be the solution to Malay economic woes. It was launched in 1970 and ended in 1990. Since then, the policy was replaced by several other successive affirmative economic policies.
