And this is why many view Dr Mahathir as the best Prime Minister Malaysia ever had. He was brave. He knew what he wanted. He knew what Umno needed. And he did not fear breaking the rules and violating the law to make sure that he achieves what he wants to see: Malays and Umno controlling the economy.
THE CORRIDORS OF POWER
Raja Petra Kamarudin
There are those who oppose the New Economic Policy (NEP) because it was promised that this policy would be around for only 20 years and would end in 1990 (and that was 25 years ago).
There are those who oppose the NEP because they consider it discriminatory since it favours one racial grouping over another (in particular the 7% Bumiputera discount on houses and the quotas in public universities and government service).
There are those who oppose the NEP because it has failed to meet its objective (it was supposed to ensure that Bumiputeras have a 30% share of the economic pie by 1990 but this did not happen).
There are those who oppose the NEP because it has (and still is) being abused to enrich a handful of people close to those who walk in the corridors of powers, mainly cronies and political supporters, while the man-on-the-street remains poor.
Then, of course there are those who oppose the NEP for the sake of opposing anything the government does, never mind whether it is good or bad.
Most who oppose the NEP would fall into at least one of the categories above. On the reverse side, we would have those who support the NEP for various reasons as well — some for emotional reasons such as since the Malays allowed citizenship for the non-Malays then the Malays should be allowed this special privilege in return.
Whatever it may be, the argument of whether the NEP has succeeded or not and whether it is being abused or not would depend on how you look at it.
As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The NEP may have been a good idea in its time, post-May 13, which was 45 years or so ago, but times change, people change, and along the way plans do get derailed and hijacked to meet another objective, which may not have been the original objective at the start.
When we debate the NEP, the focus is always just about money. But putting more money in your pockets was not the sole objective of the NEP. And if you take the 30% share of the economic pie as the yardstick to measure the success or failure of the NEP, you would most likely come to the conclusion that the NEP has failed.
One of the objectives of the NEP is to reduce the disparity between the different races and the other is to reduce the gap between the haves and the have-nots. It is what the Malays call serampang dua mata (a prong with two edges).
If you are as old as me, you probably remember the pre-NEP days of the 1950s and 1960s when Malays were farmers, fishermen and land settlers and lived mainly in the kampung. You had only two classes of Malays, the kampung Malay and the elite Malay. There was no much middle-class to speak about.
You would, of course, find rich Chinese and Indians but there were also many Chinese and Indians who were farmers, fishermen, labourers, and whatnot. Labourers in the public works and construction industry were Chinese and Indians, as were those in the plantations, mines, etc.
Since the 1800s the Chinese controlled the commerce. If you study the history of Singapore, Penang and Melaka, you will know that this was achieved through the collusion of the British colonial masters who needed taxes to run their Malayan colony.
The British Colonial Government in India refused to give Malaya any money so to finance public works and development the British were forced to find the money locally via taxes. And the taxes had to come from rich merchants, meaning the Chinese. Hence the British worked with the Chinese, in particular in the tin mining industry and opium trade, by granting the Chinese certain concessions and then taxing them.
In short, Malaysians were either at the top or at the bottom. There was a very insignificant number in the middle. So the gap between the haves and the have-nots was very large and this is what the NEP was supposed to correct.
But you restructured or re-engineered society not just by making the poor rich and/or the rich poor. This is the socialism way, not the capitalist way. And Malaysia practices capitalism, not socialism.
The old saying is you do not give the people a fish to eat for just one day but you teach them how to fish so that they can eat every day. And for that to happen you need to educate the people so that they can arm themselves with the weapon they need to improve their life and, therefore, their economic wellbeing as well.
The NEP resulted in better education not just for the Malays but for all Malaysians as well. It is estimated that at least five million Malays received a higher and/or tertiary education since the NEP was launched. And everybody got to go to school unless they chose not to.
There is no longer illiteracy in Malaysia like in the 1950s and 1960s. You do not see Chinese and Indians working in the public works, plantations and mines. The Malay farmers, fishermen and land settlers are now in the minority and no longer the majority.
The situation now is so ‘critical’ that Malaysia needs to bring in two or three million foreign workers to do the ‘dirty’ jobs that Malaysians would no longer do like back in the 1950s and 1960s.
So the secret to Malaysia’s success, partly due to the NEP, was to create a very large middle class (now so large that we have an upper-middle class, middle-middle class and lower-middle class) while eradicating the lower class (which has to be replaced by the immigrant workers).
So that solves one problem: eradicating the large lower class of the 1950s and 1960s and replacing it with a middle class. But it still does not solve the other problem: the elite class. Basically, the elite class, in this case meaning those with money rather than those in the Palace, was still very much the domain of the non-Malays, mainly Chinese and a smaller group of Indians.
And this was what Tun Dr Mahathir was upset about.
It was not enough we eradicate the lower class of Malays, Chinese and Indians. We need to break the exclusive upper class that was dominated by the non-Malays as well. We cannot just have Chinese and Indian tycoons, millionaires and billionaires. We also need Malay tycoons, millionaires and billionaires.
And this was Dr Mahathir’s Dasar Ekonomi Baru Yang Baru (New New Economic Policy). He wanted to see Malays as rich as the Chinese and Indians. He did not want just Chinese and Indian names in the list of the 100 richest Malaysians. He wanted to see at least 10, 20 or 30 Malay names in that list.
As I said, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Dr Mahathir may have been idealistic, sincere, noble, etc., in his objectives. But when you want to make people rich then, as Mario Puzo said in ‘The Godfather’, behind every great fortune, there is a crime.
Honoré de Balzac in his novel ‘Le Père Goriot’ said, “Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu’ il a été proprement fait.” This translates to: The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.
Dr Mahathir knew it was impossible to turn 10 million (now 18 million) Malays into tycoons, millionaires or billionaires. Instead, you had to handpick a few and work on them. One of them was Tun Daim Zainuddin, a man who had failed in his many business ventures until the government handpicked him to become a billionaire.
But he was not the only one. There were many others. However, one criteria for selecting these Malays to turn them into tycoons, millionaires or billionaires is that they must be cronies and supporters of Umno, the party that was going to make these people filthy rich.
So the allegation that certain people abused the NEP to make a handful of people rich is not true. The NEP was not abused — it was used. Maybe in the beginning this was not the objective of the NEP. But about halfway through, when Dr Mahathir took over as the Prime Minister, he changed the objective of the NEP from merely to reduce the disparity between the different races and to reduce the gap between the haves and the have-nots to turning a number of selected Malays close to Umno into tycoons, millionaires and billionaires.
Did Dr Mahathir hijack the NEP? No, he merely improved the objectives of the NEP by adding one more objective to it. And that is being viewed as an abuse of the NEP. Abuse, however, would depend on who you are. If you are Umno then there is no abuse.
Unlike MCA, Umno used to be a poor party back in the Merdeka and pre-NEP days. Umno needed donations from Chinese towkays to survive (which was why Tunku Abdul Rahman was close to the Chinese towkays). But that was no longer possible. Politics since the 1960s has become a very expensive game. General elections alone cost an estimated RM1.5 billion to finance. Umno needs to find a new source of funding.
And this new source has to be the rich Malays that Umno created who would share their wealth and give back some of that wealth to Umno. Many times these people were nominees of Umno. Sometimes they were partners of Umno. But whatever it may be, they shared what Umno gave them to make sure that Umno had enough money to stay in power.
And this is why many view Dr Mahathir as the best Prime Minister Malaysia ever had. He was brave. He knew what he wanted. He knew what Umno needed. And he did not fear breaking the rules and violating the law to make sure that he achieves what he wants to see: Malays and Umno controlling the economy.
And if Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak is putting all this at risk by endangering the survival of Umno, then he needs to be ousted and replaced with a new prime minister. That, in a nutshell, is why Najib has to go.
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