Isma: Child of the NEP
Dr. Lim Teck Ghee, CPI
45 years after the New Economic Policy was introduced, the harvest of the NEP is being reaped. The NEP was supposed to have a 20 year time span and to end in 1990. That did not happen. It was supposed to nurture a Malay middle and upper class and to produce Malay professionals at least equal in number to the non-Malay professionals who had dominated the country’s economic life in the late 1960s. That did happen.
Despite official efforts to understate the development of the Malay middle and upper class (so as to justify the continuation of NEP programmes), the growth of the Malay educated and professional group rivalling and even exceeding that of the non-Malays became an accomplished fact by the 1990s. The irrefutable proof is the abandonment, in the year 2000, of a critical table comparing the number of Malay and non-Malay professionals – a key feature of all Malaysia Plans since 1970.
From a very small base of professional and technical workers in 1970 (Bumiputera comprised 4.9% of registered professionals at that time) the Malay component of professional and technical workers today is the biggest amongst the various racial groups. According to the Third Outline Perspective Plan (2001-2010) the Bumiputera community comprised 63.5 per cent of the Professional and Technical category of employment in 2000.
This growth of a strong Malay professional class within 30 years is possibly the fastest recorded by any marginalized community. That this information is not widely known or disseminated is not due to modesty but due to controlled political spin aimed at underreporting Malay achievement and emphasizing non-Malay dominance of the economy.
As further evidence of the extraordinary growth of Malay educated, MARA alone has graduated more than 700,000 students, almost all Malay since its inception in the 1960s. Over 500,000 students were recipients of MARA scholarships, more than 200,000 received business loans from MARA from 1951 to 2012, and over 150,000 MARA students received entrepreneurship training. If we add to this total the number of Malay students who have graduated from the public universities or have been recipients of financial assistance from government linked organizations as well as from private sector organizations, what emerges is the undeniably successful implementation of a programme of racial preference in education, unparalleled in the region if not the world in terms of its magnitude and outreach.
So what are the real returns of this massive, all-encompassing national policy favouring the Malay component of the population? Other than its quantitative results in the number of beneficiaries and the individual and collective outcomes in better jobs and higher incomes for these beneficiaries, what have been the benefits in terms of goals such as social cohesion, racial harmony, national solidarity, social justice and the moral basis of the nation?
