What makes the Malays ‘lazy’

So the children of farmers and fishermen were doomed to become farmers and fishermen. They had not learned any other skills and due to lack of education there was nothing else they could do until the day they died. You could say, in a way, they followed the family tradition.

NO HOLDS BARRED

Raja Petra Kamarudin

If we want to analyse why the Malays are ‘lazy’, we cannot just look at the last few years or so. We have to go back at least 50 years or more if we want to understand the problem, if we can even call it a problem in the first place.

First of all, when we talk about Malays we need to differentiate between city-dwelling Malays and rural Malays. We cannot lump all Malays into one category just like we have Shanghai Chinese, Hong Kong Chinese, Taiwan Chinese, Guangdong Chinese, Xinjiang Chinese, overseas Chinese, and so on.

Not all Chinese think the same way or do the same thing. And this applies to the Malays as well. And let me assure you that I made ten trips to China in the 1990s and visited the most remote parts of China to meet the people there and to speak to them so that I can better understand the China Chinese psyche.

I met students and deans of faculties and corporate people plus poor farmers in places where they have never seen a Malaysian in their entire life — who were quite amazed that Malaysians looked just like Gwailos. (Well, I was the only Malaysian they had ever met).

At this point you may be wondering why I made so many trips to China and travelled all over China to meet so many people.

Well, I told my wife (who accompanied me on nine of those trips) that China is about to become the largest economy in the world plus maybe a superpower that will overtake the U.S. and by 2020 China is going to become very important to ASEAN. Hence we need to understand China, the country that is going to be ASEAN’s ‘big brother’.

That was over 20 years ago and I would to believe that my prediction was right and that I saw it coming before it happened.

By the way, the person who persuaded me to go to China and went with me on my first trip to introduce me to China and help open my eyes to the future of China was a Singaporean Chinese who worked with GE.

Anyway, before you jump on me and call me a Malay apologist, or accuse me of trying to justify why the Malays are ‘backward’, let me assure you that what I am about to say is an attempt to look at Malays as objectively as I possibly can.

My Aunty, Raja Fuziah Tun Uda, was one of the pioneers of the Rural Industrial Development Authority (RIDA), which later transformed into the Majlis Amanah Rakyat (MARA). Their office was along Lornie Road (now called Jalan Syed Putra) near the Kuen Cheng Girls’ School (now called Kuen Cheng High School).

Now, the British formed RIDA in 1951 (six years before Merdeka) to provide economic assistance and support to fishermen, farmers and Malaya’s rural population. In 1966, by Act of Parliament, it was converted to MARA.

So you see, RIDA, and then MARA, were created before the New Economic Policy of the 1970s and was, in fact, a British idea. And the purpose was to make sure that Malayans who were living at the lowest rung of the economic ladder were given a decent place under the Malayan sun.

Around the time of Merdeka, the construction labourers and tin mine workers were mainly Chinese, the public works workers (railway included) and estate labourers mainly Indians, and the fishermen and farmers were majority Malays.

Today, the Chinese and Indians no longer do that type work (the Indonesians and other immigrant workers have taken over) while most farmers and fishermen are still Malays.

Why do Malays become fishermen and farmers and not work in the construction, road building, railway, estate, etc., industries? This is because the children of farmers and fishermen join their parents and grandparents in the padi fields or follow their fathers and grandfathers to go fishing. They start very young, even before they become teenagers, and hence do not go to school.

So the children of farmers and fishermen were doomed to become farmers and fishermen. They had not learned any other skills and due to lack of education there was nothing else they could do until the day they died. You could say, in a way, they followed the family tradition.

For hundreds of years, children of farmers and fishermen continued the family tradition of working in the padi fields or in going out to sea. It is like children of slaves will also become slaves and there would be no other future for them.

Then along came RIDA in 1951 and then MARA in 1966 to change all this. Children of fishermen and farmers were not encouraged to become fishermen and farmers at the age of ten or younger. They were encouraged to go to school instead. And the government campaigned and persuaded the famers and fishermen to send their children to school so that the vicious cycle of poverty can be broken.

So, in time, children of fishermen and farmers received a primary education and then a secondary education and later on a college or university education. They no longer knew how to plant padi or catch fish. Anyway, why should a college or university graduate waste his education planting padi or catching fish?

Furthermore, the fishing and padi industry were no longer economically viable.

First of all, the cost to plant padi was too high and the price of rice was too low. In Malaysia, padi is planted on a small-scale basis and after many generations the padi lots were just too small to be economical.

This is because, under the Islamic Sharia law, when someone dies his land is subdivided by the deceased’s descendants. So, after many generations and after many sub-divisions, the plots became just too small you could not even get a tractor into those plots. And pooling those plots into a cooperative like in China is easier said than done (you need Communism for that where land becomes communal and not privately owned).

Hence the Islamic Sharia law of dividing up the land after someone dies is partly to blame. Other countries introduced mechanisation so their production cost of rice was low while the production cost of rice in Malaysia was too high. Then there was the manipulation of the price by the middlemen to add to this problem.

It was now far cheaper to import rice than to produce it ourselves and that is why even after half a decade since Merdeka Malaysia is still not self-sufficient in rice and we still need to import our rice to feed the entire 30 million population.

If the rice exporting countries face a crisis and they stop sending us rice Malaysians are going to starve.

The fishing industry also saw mechanisation and large trawler boats owned by Chinese and Thai fishing tycoons (even some of those companies in Thailand are Chinese owned and I know because I visited them) started fishing in Malaysian waters.

The problem with this is, because of these large trawlers, Malaysia saw over-fishing and 70% of the fish they caught is trash fish, which is not fit for human consumption but can only be used in the fertilizer or animal feed industry.

After some years there was no longer any fish in Malaysian waters and you needed to go 100 miles out to sea to find fish, which was impossible for the small Malay sampans but viable if you owned multi-million trawlers that Malay fishermen could not afford.

Anyway, even if the padi planting and fishing industries were still viable, there was no longer any labour force. The children of fishermen and farmers no longer planted padi or fished. They had been sent to school. So they sought careers in the government service or corporate world.

We now had Malay engineers, architects, doctors, and whatnot who would have become fishermen or farmers had they not been sent to school and had the government not created RIDA and then MARA, the brainchild of the British colonial masters.

Today, we see poverty in places where farming and fishing is still a way of life. On a normal day these places would be deserted but during Hari Raya we would see traffic jams when the Malays who work and live in the big towns and cities go back to their kampung.

Some Malays whose parents or grandparents are already dead do not even bother going back because there is nothing for them back in the kampung anyway.

Malays from the kampung do not become construction labourers or estate workers because they were never trained to be that. They were trained to be fishermen and padi planters or else they were sent to school so that they can be freed from a life of poverty as fishermen and padi planters.

You may ask why are the Indonesians prepared to do menial labour at low wages? To get that answer you should also look at Singapore. Singaporeans, too, would not do menial labour at low wages.

So the Bangladeshis are brought in to do that work. And these Bangladeshis are exploited and ill treated by their employers. You should talk to the NGOs in Singapore to get the full horror stories about how the Bangladeshis are treated just like slaves.

But the Bangladeshis suffer even more back in Bangladesh. So they do not mind being exploited and treated like slaves in Singapore, which is still a better life compared to the life back home. But no Singaporean would want to do the work that the Bangladeshis are prepared to do.

I met and talked to many illegal VCD sellers, mainly Chinese. We even have them here in Manchester. Why do they sell illegal VDCs and not work as a driver for a rich Chinese taukay? Simple! It is because they make more money selling illegal VCDs than in working as a driver for a rich Chinese taukay.

Chinese employ Filipino or Indonesians maids. Malays will not do that work. Why? Well, because the hours are long and the pay is low, plus most times you get mistreated and scolded. If the pay is good why don’t Chinese girls work as maids rather than work in massage parlours (where they make more money for less work)?

It is the same in China. Poor Chinese from the west travel to eastern cities like Shanghai to do the jobs the Shanghainese would not do. They sleep on the streets and beg for work. If China was not one large country but was many smaller countries (like what Russia is now) then what we will see in China is what we see in Malaysia.

Anyway, this essay of mine is not really complete and you can regard this as a mere summary of the issue. There is so much more I can say in analysing this Malay dilemma. Nevertheless, allow me to stop here for now and if you think I need to expand my views in a second of third article we can discuss this in more detail later.