Malay Chutzpah, Productivity and Creativity vital ingredients of a High Income Economy

by SakmongkolAK47 (March 12, 2010)

How do we get to a high income economy? By leveraging on productivity and creativity says the PM. Productivity depends on personalized knowledge- how deep you cultivate yourself with the required knowledge and skills. This is the key to wealth creation- infusing oneself with the ‘want’ and will to succeed. This, you can’t legislate nor can you depend on others to do it for you.

Has Been led-MPM, Perkasa and Ibrahim Ali can’t do it for the Malays

MPM can’t do it for the Malays. Ibrahim Ali certainly can’t. Perkasa can’t. It  is just an organization for has beens to stay politically relevant. See and be seen place. You can’t plan for the myriad of urges that reside in people. This you leave to the market system. It will prove to be liberating for the Malays who have had centuries of inhibiting culture. How do you know they cannot thrive under a regime that is freer?

Successful Malays are self made

Those Malays, who have turned out to be successful, shared one common characteristic- each has developed more or less under of regime of freedom from central command. They have cultivated themselves with the skills and creativity under a regime of self-made success.

It’s not that when you adopt a freer market system, those Malays in power will abandon their inclination to help out, will they? It’s not that when you adopt a freer market system, Malays immediately lose their demographic advantage? Or Article 153 will disappear. Or the institution of the monarchy will disappear. Or the religion that resides in each individual’s bosom will go up in smoke!

What the elites fear is that when we adopt a more liberal climate, we have competition and those lay-abouts and loafer-mentality leaders will be booted out. What the elites fear is the emergence of competing good leadership. What’s missing is good leadership at the implementing levels. Dedicated, selfless, efficient and visionary leadership at the implementing levels.

Good Leadership: No Second Raters, only creme de la cre’me

Let’s start by bringing good leadership here. Let’s not have second raters as department heads, second raters at the front line. Let’s make the civil service exemplary, the repository of the Malay creme de la crème. Creativity in turn, depends on willingness to push your imagination to the limits. Both thrive on freedom of the individual. This is directly opposite the economic philosophies of those pushing for a revitalized NEP.

NEP has failed the Malays at large

Has the NEP failed? For the Malays at large it has. They have pointed out to me the facts about every branch of the executive and most of the legislative being controlled by Malays. Yet the position of Malays has not moved even to the 75% mark. We targeted 30% ownership of corporate wealth; we now have only 19%. What about land ownership? What about many other things which are of economic significance? What about ownership of housing, land, factories and business premises, capital goods?

How do you reconcile these economic outcomes with the fact that almost all decision making resources are controlled by Malays? The answer: the Malays controlling decision making resources have not assisted Malays in getting their economic share. They helped themselves more as evidenced by the highest GINI ratio within the Malays. Income disparities between Malays have widened most when compared to income disparities between races.

This clearly suggest that those who helped themselves to having special relationships, to having shared ‘market’ knowledge have advanced more than those dependent on others; this was the system that resulted from the implementation of the NEP.

Someone said 20 acre may not be much.  But FELDA is the only land ownership scheme that has successfully elevated Malays economically and any land schemes that replicated the FELDA methods have more or less succeeded in elevating Malays economically. FELCRA, RISDA etc. Because land is an important wealth creating resource. They have empowered the common man. So giving 20 acres each directly to economic actors is no small and shallow matter.

My friend in Kampung Jaya Gading in Kuantan aged 65 has more economic sense than Ibrahim Ali. It’s because people like Ibrahim Ali who has been shouting loudly about Malay this and Malay that have not been genuinely helping out Malays like my friend. There is no need to talk about complex economic theories and economic conspiracies secretly planned by non-Malays to take over this country.

The real enemies are not non-Malays- every business venture carried out by the shouting Malays are done in partnership with Chinese towkays. Many of the UMNO leaders up there have Chinese as partners running their businesses. So how can the Chinese be the enemy of the Puteras in the Bumi? No, it failed because  transforming  Malay leadership is not there.

So my kampong friend has his own vision 2020. He says it bluntly- 2020 means, 2 for Chinese 0 for Malays; 2 for Indians, 0 for Malays. Looking at the Malaysian Business top 10 richest Malaysian, his vision 2020 is more prescient than Mahathir’s 2020. Let us see what the NEM is all about.

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