Dump the NEP
By developing colour-blind affirmative action programmes along this philosophy, you immediately remove the notion that opportunities are associated with the race to which you belong, even though the bulk of the beneficiaries, given the demographics and their social condition, are likely to still be Malays anyway.
Suflan Shamsuddin, The Malaysian Insider
In 1970, Bumiputras held 1.5 per cent of the country’s wealth. Today they hold 19 per cent, out of which 16 per cent is held by trust institutions and funds.
This means that over the life of the NEP, despite everything, individual Bumiputra wealth has grown from 1.5 to 3 per cent.
Hardly anything to be proud of. And what has been the costs of this meagre achievement?
Well there is of course the actual cost of making all of these opportunities available in the first place, whether in relation to business and entrepreneurship, education and scholarships, concessions, discounts, pink-slips, property ownership, etc. But that is not all.
Think of the cost to the country for retaining a feudalistic patronage based system that enlarges the socio-economic divide between rich and poor, because the former are the ones who mostly profit from this arrangement.
Think of the sickening and crippling effect that Ketuanan Melayu has had on the mentality and attitudes of many Malays who are conditioned to be dependent on crutches and to embrace short-termism, and who now struggle with issues of self-confidence and self-reliance in a challenging global market place.
What about the cost of having countless businessmen (many of whom were Malays, I might add) who have been wiped out, not by non-Malay competition, but by other Malay businessmen who so happens to have the right ‘connections’ to those in power and pedigree. What about the costs associated with having hundreds of thousands of Malay graduates who have a degree but can’t get good jobs because their qualifications have no market or industry value.
All of these things have a cost to the Malays and everyone in Malaysia.
Let’s not forget the costs associated with the fact that millions of poor and needy non-Malay Malaysians have had no effective social welfare net to rely on so that they remain in squalor. Think also of the costs associated with how disunited we as are, by splitting society into those who are ‘princes of the soil’, and those who aren’t.
We would need to add to this, the costs of having weakened and ineffective institutions of government, across all of its branches, whether it is the legislature, the judiciary or the executive. That would of course include the costs of a bloated and inefficient government beauracracy which has had to absorb countless numbers of Malay graduates that might not find employment elsewhere.
We would also need to take account of the substandard education that our children are getting, and the cost that propaganda and brainwashing has had on making Malays inept to take on the challenges to survive in a meritocratic environment.
The total costs of the NEP would also need to include the very high cost of bailouts and fixing things that have gone wrong because of misused opportunities.
What about the cost of market distortions from lost productivity and competitiveness when competing for business, talent and foreign direct investment and the consequential cost (including for example, brain drain) that follows?
And what of the cost of corruption, that is a necessary bi-product of maintaining a system that lives off of patronage? All these costs must be computed and added to the total NEP bill.
If you try to monetize the aggregate cost of the NEP (or whatever its current incarnation is called), it must run into the hundreds of billions of ringgits, if not more. The NEP has cost the country a mountain of money, and its achievements are at best shoddy and patchy, especially for the Malays themselves.
