Putrajaya should not roll out more aid for the Malays as it has done about all it could for the country’s largest community, former minister Datuk Zaid Ibrahim said yesterday. Instead, the government should act fairly by helping Malaysians regardless of race, Zaid said when sniping at the Najib administration’s plan to boost the stake of the largely-Malay Bumiputera in the economy due to be announced on Saturday. “More help for the Malays from Putrajaya? No, not again,” Zaid, once de facto law minister under the previous Abdullah administration, said in a series of tweets yesterday. “Government has done everything you can think of for the Malays. About time govt start doing things for ALL malaysians (sic)”. “There have already been many government initiatives to help the Malays, ranging from giving them the opportunity to acquire 30 per cent equity in Chinese listed firms to letting them enjoying a 5 per cent discount on property purchases,” he said in a subsequent statement to The Malay Mail Online. He went on to name other measures to uplift the community, such as needing businesses to be majority Bumiputera owned to be eligible to deal with the Ministry of Finance and gain access to government contracts, along with easier entry to higher education via matriculation and reserved places in public institutions of higher learning. “In fact, I think the government has tried almost everything in the last 40 years under the Malay preference policy. Malays have never had it so good,” said Zaid. Zaid also speculated the reason for the upcoming announcement to be the Umno party election next month, saying Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak needed to convince the party of his credentials. “An Umno leader is a Malay hero and he must therefore show what he can do for the Malays,” he said. But Zaid also explained the pitfalls that will render additional affirmative action for the community ineffectual. Noting that such attempts invariably involved Umno members first, Zaid alleged that such benefits were often filtered at that level and failed to trickle down to the intended recipients. He also said the Malay community has grown to expect “instant” results from such programmes and lacked the patience for the long-term reforms needed to permanently improve their lot. Instead, he said they only wanted easy handouts ― preferably cash ― such as the 1 Malaysia People’s Aid scheme. “Whatever new initiatives the PM’s office will come out with, I doubt they will be helpful to the majority of the Malays or even to the country,” he said, adding that what the community needed was to be told “there will be no more special treatment for them”. Zaid’s comments came as Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak confirmed that he would move to increase the Bumiputera’s role in the country’s economy. “I will soon announce a comprehensive policy to encourage Bumiputera participation in the economy,” Najib was quoted as saying yesterday on his Twitter account by Reuters. The international news agency similarly noted that Najib will face the Umno polls next month, which ultimately decides who becomes the country’s prime minister by virtue of its dominance over the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition. Najib’s expected announcement this Saturday could draw criticism for what is seen as a departure from his initial move in 2009 to reform the country’s decades-old economic policy. After he first took office in April 2009, Najib tried to dismantle the alleged preferential treatment by introducing the New Economic Model (NEM), which was then touted as a shift from race-based affirmative action into a needs-based model. But he was forced to launch a stripped-down version of the NEM after the policy was criticised by pro-establishment supporters. Many have long questioned the federal government’s retention of affirmative action policies that they argue benefit only the Bumiputera majority — and in particular the Malay community — long after their original purposes should have been achieved. The New Economic Policy (NEP), mooted by Najib’s father and the country’s second Prime Minister Tun Razak Hussein, has been the most cited example of unfair policies. Introduced in 1971, the NEP had an ambitious and noble goal to redress the socio-economic gap between townspeople that were largely Chinese, and the rural Malays and other Bumiputera, within the span of two decades. It ended officially in 1990, but the key aspects of its affirmative action plan remain in place in various forms years later. In Election 2013, Najib’s Umno, which traditionally draws its support from the rural Malay community, emerged as the strongest party in the BN when it won 88 of the coalition’s haul of 133 federal seats. The federal opposition Pakatan Rakyat, which had pushed for a needs-based approach that would improve the lot of Malaysians regardless of race, failed to wrest control of Putrajaya despite winning the popular vote. -- Themalaymailonline
Posted on: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 04:31:42 +0000
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