Bumiputera Economic Congress 2024
A hundred years from now, they’ll still be talking about the need to catch up with the non-Malays, never mind that by then the non-Malays will be only a tiny minority given their low birth rates and present migration trends. If they keep on pursuing failed policies and neglecting the B40 group, they might someday have to talk about catching up with Indonesian, Bangladeshi and other migrants.
Dennis Ignatius
Part 2: It’s all about empowering the elites
Speakers at the Bumiputera Economic Congress made much of their concern for the B40 group, the people most disadvantaged by our current economic system. Most of them are Malays. For them the promises of Merdeka remain an illusion.
Unemployment and underemployment are major problems; businesses prefer to hire cheap foreign labour rather than pay locals a decent wage. As Dr Michael Jeyakumar Devaraj noted recently, “A small number of bumiputera control the companies that bring in excess migrant workers and depress the wages of the B40 bumiputera layer, making it difficult for the B40 to find work with a decent salary”.[1] For the most part they earn the minimum wage and have to struggle to make ends meet. Whole generations have been condemned to poverty.
The politicians know all this. Economists and social scientists have studied the problem for decades; it’s not rocket science. If there’s political will, the problems of the B40 group can be solved quite easily.
It doesn’t happen because Bumiputera elites prefer to talk about equity ownership, more money for bumiputera entrepreneurs, bigger allocations for all sorts of projects, increasing the size of Bumiputera land ownership, etc. – all of which benefit them rather than the B40 group.
All these proposals – put forward with a straight face – are really quite revolting and utterly shameless. They are just out to grab as much as they can get in the name of Bumiputera empowerment. And it is the dwindling non-Malay minority that has to disproportionately shoulder the burden of this exploitative system.
To justify the continuance of the current discriminatory economic system, they keep changing the goal posts, adding new often vague conditionalities, new parameters and new demands to help the Bumiputeras “catch up.” Of course, ambiguous goals are hard to reach but that’s the whole idea.
