Mara, berdikari Malays, and the Merdeka spirit

 

The Umno president, who is also deputy prime minister, was quoted as saying that Mara, the government agency tasked with uplifting the economic status of the Malays, should be allowed to offer its own primary education schooling.

According to him, this would complement Mara’s current offerings of secondary and tertiary education.

If the proposal materialises, it would hand Mara an immense influence on the course of the Malays’ progress – or the Malays’ lack of progress.

But as for the Umno president’s comments, here are the possible explanations:

There’s a viable business case for Mara running a parallel education system for the Malays – or he’s just fishing for Malay votes.

It’s a sly effort to gouge more affirmative action benefits for Malays – or he’s just fishing for Malay votes.

He’s creating a diversion from dealing with our underperforming education system because he doesn’t know how to fix it – or he’s just fishing for Malay votes.

He’s just fishing for the Malay votes.

I’ve foamed at the mouth multiple times on the topic of education (and on Mara…) See previous articles at these links: >1 >2 >3 >4 >5

I guess the foaming continues.

Anyway, back to Mara. It was set up decades ago to help the-then mostly rural Malays improve their lives. Has it achieved its goals? Probably not, if the unending Malay Economic Congresses that keep asking for more goodies are any indication.

So, has Mara failed?

It depends on how you define success and failure. The politicians would argue that without Mara, things would have been so much worse for the Malays; so, to them, that counts as success.

True enough. But in the real world, success is measured against set objectives. In the real world, resources aren’t infinite, and there are pesky timeframes, critical milestones and quantifiable results expected.

In the real world, there are rewards and punishments based on the results. But this is politics. Politics creates its own reality.

Here’s what I imagine Mara’s objective was – or perhaps should be: create a strong and independent Malay nation. Or as my favourite word from the old days says it – Malays who are 

berdikari

, or 

berdiri diatas kaki sendiri

. Literally, standing on our own two feet.

In short, Malays would have overcome the handicap that has kept us behind for centuries – the fear and insecurity bred by colonisation and kept alive by a feudal system that benefits the elites at the expense of the masses.

Has Mara achieved this objective? Are Malays now strong enough that we can 

Berdiri sama tinggi, duduk sama rendah

 – stand as high and sit as low – as anybody else?

If we are, we would be saying goodbye to Mara and the whole slew of never-ending affirmative actions based on race. We would be telling the world to bring it on, that we don’t need any crutches to deal with it.

But unfortunately, when you create a bureaucracy such as Mara, its primary goal is to ensure its own survival, regardless of whatever lofty ambitions assigned to it. Everything else becomes secondary.

With the power of politics behind it, Mara and its boosters, exploiters, enablers and certainly, parasites too, will double down on a misguided strategy guaranteeing its own survival over any other considerations.

In politics, however, failure can be success.

If Malays have indeed reached the goal of ‘berdikari’, we would have dismantled the entire state-owned or state-controlled affirmative action apparatus, from state agencies to GLCs and GICs and to Mara itself.

But then there would be a horde of people thrown into the 

real world

, one where most of us exist.

They would discover that there are no guarantees they would keep their jobs in a pandemic or get a pay rise when inflation bites – or when an election beckons.

They wouldn’t like it, and they would fight to ensure we would never get there. We are nowhere near our objective because we chose to do the easy rather than the hard thing. We refused the bitter medicine because we preferred the easier life of addiction and entitlement.

It is an admission of failure: since we cannot prevail on a level playing ground, we’ll create our own playing field instead, one where we set the rules and also where nobody else can play.

That is what drives the notion of creating our own education system. And as most graduates from this system will have problems finding employment in the 

real world

, let us create an alternative world of employment through government agencies and ministries and GLCs.

Admittedly, the Mara education system has achieved much success in providing secondary and tertiary education to many Malays, and the chance to live a life better than that of their parents.

But this focus on quantity over quality also has its own downsides. It has helped to dumb down our education and social system to create compliant, entitled and needy people.

Some may say the Chinese and Indian communities also have their own education systems. Well, Malays already have our own education system: the religious education system that covers everything from pre-school to university.

There, we set the syllabuses and standards based on the afterworld rather than today’s world. And on top of that, we Malays already 

own

 the current government-mandated national education system! It’s ours, even if it’s becoming increasingly parochial, myopic and unfit for purpose.

Instead of fixing what’s not working, and preparing the Malays to ‘berdikari’, we’ve decided we don’t want to play the current game because it’s too tough. Instead, we want to create a new and exclusive game in our own world free of inconvenient competition and accountability.

By promising a solution for all our problems, Mara is moving away from being a safety net for us while we learn to walk and then run. Along the way, it’s also become a useful tool for the Malay elites.

These elites want to use Mara and its almost unlimited resources guaranteed by politics to create a convenient and comfortable world for themselves and their families.

By continuing to prey on the fears and insecurity of the Malays, they’ll get to create an exclusive world for themselves at everybody else’s expense.

Mark my words – whatever is being dreamed off for Mara is not meant to help the millions of ordinary Malays facing an increasingly tough world that they’re ill equipped to handle.

They’re just an inconvenient but useful tool to guarantee a warm, comfortable and lucrative world for the elites.

On this sobering note, I wish all Malaysians a happy Hari Merdeka, and I pray that a true Merdeka will come when we Malays liberate ourselves from fear and insecurity and face the hard slog to claim our rightful spot under the Malaysian sun. - FMT

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.