The folly of the majority
I am all for helping the Malays but we must help them properly. By all means, give them scholarships, business loans and other incentives, but why can’t such assistance be part of a holistic economic policy that doesn’t identify beneficiaries according to their race?
Zaid Ibrahim
The Umno President has once again announced a massive government initiative dedicated to helping only the Malays and the Bumiputera under the New Economic Model. This “disadvantaged group,” comprising more than 70% of the population, will be getting more of the usual special treatment from the Government in the form of contracts, grants, unit trusts and loans worth more than RM30 billion. Why they are not able to help this group by having good and fair policies for all Malaysians was never explained.
Now preferential policies for the Malays are deemed as a right. It has become a huge political gimmick where the Malays are regularly told that if they want these special rights and privileges to continue, they have to vote for Umno. In fact, some Umno leaders scoff at the so-called “unfairness” of these policies and scold their colleagues for being apologetic about it.
What I find most distasteful and hard to stomach are the pretensions that go with the policy announcement. There is this condescending assurance that the rights of “others” will not be affected, and that since the economy will continue to grow, no one will lose. If that were true then the non-Malays will continue to have more than the Malays, and this is certainly untenable for the special people.
It took 40 years for Malay corporate wealth to move from 2% to 23%. Do not ask me why. But surely that means that to move from the present rate to, say, 50% will take another 50 years at least if not more. By then the non-Malays will represent only 20-23 % of the population and so the question then for Utusan Malaysia will be, why allow the Chinese to have wealth on parity or greater than those from the majority race? Equity, the new buzzword, or equitable treatment therefore requires the non-Malays to “forego or give up” what they have to allow for equitable treatment to the Malays. So why pretend that we care about fairness or act concerned about making sure others will not be “unfairly treated”? Fairness is irrelevant. The idea of special preference itself is a negation of fairness.
It’s ironic that these leaders shouted Hidup Melayu to celebrate this pernicious policy, because it is actually a death knell for the Malays. The original policy of 40 years ago has become something else: it’s now a repository of all that is crude, unsophisticated and unthinking. What can be simpler than the idea of grabbing as much as you can whilst you have power? The deleterious and negative effects of this can be seen in the behaviour and values of these Umno Malays.
Today, after many years of being “special”, the Malays who are successful are never accepted for their ability; they must have received “special treatment” from Umno. This is particularly true if they do not support Umno’s policies. The dispensation of special treatment enables Umno to pick and choose the winners and after 40 years we can see clearly how some Malays are more equal than others. The greed emanating from this group of the “NEW RICH” is shocking. The lower income groups remain untouched by new injection of financial and economic assistance; its always the Malay Contractors; members of the Malay Chambers, and of course the elite who get the bulk of the special treatment. When will the Malays realized the special treatment formula is nothing special except for some?
Short sightedness is another product of the special treatment. Malay businessmen are not encouraged to collaborate with the non Malays when such collaboration will open new supply chain and new opportunities. It’s the same with education.
The Chancellor of Universiti Teknologi MARA proudly announced that the university is no place for non-Malays. He assumes that non-Malays want to go there in the first place. He also ignores the possible benefits that can come from having a more diverse student body — he is probably oblivious to the fact that we can learn valuable traits, attitudes and values from those who are different from us. It sadly does not occur to him that the presence of non-Malays might actually be useful for the Malays, the people he wants to champion.
