Singapore’s Kuan Yew says Malaysia bleeding talent due to race policy

ARCHIVES 2013

By admin-s On Aug 7, 2013

(The Malaysian Insider) – “They are prepared to lose that talent in order to maintain the dominance of one race”

Malaysia’s acute brain drain problem is due to its government’s insistence on promoting “one race” above all others, former Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew wrote in his latest book.

Malaysia experiences a severe talent flight issue with an estimated 5 per cent of skilled locals exiting the country on an annual basis, with the main beneficiary being Singapore.

A World Bank report from 2011 concluded that 20 per cent of Malaysian graduates opt to quit the country, again with Singapore cited as the preferred destinations. Worryingly for Malaysia, the report concluded that these migrants were being replaced by unskilled and uneducated foreigners.

“They are prepared to lose that talent in order to maintain the dominance of one race,” read an excerpt of Lee’s book, “One Man’s View of the World”.

“This is putting the country at a disadvantage. It is voluntarily shrinking the talent pool needed to build the kind of society that makes use of talent from all races,” Lee continued in parts of the book reproduced by news portal The Malaysian Insider.

In a report last month, British newspaper The Guardian cited analysts as saying the cloud of the New Economic Policy (NEP) race-based affirmative action may stifle investment and hamper Malaysia’s quest for developed nation status come 2020 and drag the bottom 40 per cent of its population into high-income status.

Born from the communal dissatisfaction that climaxed during the May 13, 1969 race riots, the NEP was designed ostensibly to lift the poorer sections of the Bumiputera Malay group in a bid to help it catch up to the economic progress of other communities.

Although technically defunct since 1990, the application of the NEP remains very much alive albeit unofficially.