NEW ECONOMIC POLICY: ‘SNEAKY’ AZMIN’S ‘REVIEW’ TO PAVE WAY FOR ANOTHER REBRANDING EXERCISE ALA UMNO – OR WILL MAHATHIR REALLY OVERHAUL THE SYSTEM TO BENEFIT THOSE WHO NEED HELP

Economic affairs minister Azmin Ali claimed that the government was prepared to review the New Economic Policy.

To review the NEP the government has to be really serious about it, not just doing some window-dressing and start an old venture all over again.

Back in 1990 when the NEP was at the end of the 20-year cycle, Mahathir reviewed the policy, and gave it a new name, National Development Policy of NDP.

As a matter of fact, NDP was NEP in a different name!

Under NDP, the government strongly promoted privatization and set up more government-linked companies to take part in the country’s economic activities.

The good thing is, the economic cake was enlarged and funds swelled through equity market fund raising.

As a result, one after another mega project was launched.

Such economic activities from the award of government contracts, equity distribution, management and operation, etc., were offered primarily to the bumiputras under the guiding principle of “social restructuring” of NEP / NDP.

Unfortunately, not every bumi in this country could gain access to the wealth, which was reserved for specific interest group.

The first to reap the benefits were naturally Umno big guns and their people.

Starting from then, Umno leaders and people around them could count on endless streams of wealth coming their way.

We cannot deny that indeed NEP and NDP have helped eliminate poverty through the release of government resources.

But, on social restructuring, although on the surface the wealth gap between bumis and non-bumis has been narrowed, it was in reality a redistribution of public resources and interests to the privileged few and politically linked cronies, by way of political powers.

These “privileged few” and nouveaux riches then “subdivided” the windfall in establishing their own hierarchy of political and business networks.

That was when NEP began to turn bad and became the source of Umno’s eventual decline.

Majority of Malays without political background, along with non-bumi communities in the country, were literally alienated from the economic benefits of NEP.

Then in 2010, NDP came to yet the end of another 20-year cycle. Then PM Najib Razak came out with a replacement called New Economic Model or NEM.

An extension of NEP, NEM vowed to make Malaysia a high-income country.

To speed up economic expansion, some sectors were liberalized and quotas for non-bumis and foreign investors were expanded.

Nonetheless, such liberalization came under the powerful objection of Umno conservatives and vested interests.

Slowly, NEM faded into oblivion over the years because it was in essence NEP, a grander version of it indeed.

Following the collapse of the BN administration, the Umno interest group established under NEP will now come to the end of the road. No more contracts or shares for them.

There are two things the new PH government can do: give NEP another new name and start building a brand new interest group to inherit all the economic benefits, or completely overhaul the existing policy and draw up a fully transparent, equitable and liberal policy based on meritocracy, and decisively sever the ramification of ties between economic and political powers.

I sincerely hope the new government will pick the latter.

– Mysinchew