A Doctor in The House: A Memoir of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad (37 page)

My views on PAS clearly stated, I did decide to speak at a PAS campaign during the Kapar by-election in April 1971, when I was out of UMNO. My frustration at not being heard had festered to that extent. In my speech I commented on the softness of UMNO in dealing with the MCA and MIC. I pointed out that rich Chinese 
towkays
 were friendly with the top UMNO leaders and appeared to be influencing them.

It was a huge political risk, one that could have cost me what few ties I had remaining with UMNO. I feared my decision would anger my supporters in the party, so I took pains not to identify myself with PAS. I used the opportunity only to air my own views and I made sure that whatever I said that was critical of UMNO could not be construed as support or endorsement of PAS. It was a fine line to tread, but in the event, I did not lose the support of those in UMNO who regarded me as their voice in the campaign to change the leadership of the party.

Over 30 years later, my detractors among the UMNO leaders still delight in reminding the party that I once spoke at a PAS rally. What they seem to have forgotten is that soon after the speech, UMNO Youth, led by Datuk Harun Idris, came to persuade me to rejoin UMNO. The episode was forgotten after my return and I gained much support from the UMNO rank and file when I made bids for positions in the Supreme Council.

Although they provided me with a platform, PAS showed no inclination to have me in their party. They feared losing the Chinese votes that had helped them defeat UMNO in a number of constituencies, including my own, in the 1969 General Election. Their subsequent flirting with DAP years later was laughable but, in this sense, not surprising.

Meanwhile, Tun Razak heard that I had spoken at a PAS event and had criticised UMNO. He was probably informed by people hoping to elicit a negative reaction from him towards me. His response must have disappointed them. Instead of taking offence, he simply said that I was not an UMNO member and was therefore free to say what I liked.

I was not in contact with him at that time—in fact, I made no attempt to establish contact with any of the UMNO leaders—but I sensed that, in some ways, he held similar views to mine. I think he also knew that I was never angry with the party, just with the Tunku’s leadership. I believed fiercely that the party was right in its philosophy and approach and that it was more than capable of attaining its objectives if there was a change of leadership and Tun Razak took over.

I still managed to keep track of developments within UMNO through the newspapers, from rumours and via a few party members who communicated by phone and sometimes met me. My mind kept turning to how I could make my views known in a widespread manner. The newspapers would certainly not publish what I said.

I remembered several articles I had written while I was still a Member of Parliament and began to sit down and write more of them, on different subjects that supported my ideas on the Malays and the possible solutions for their problems. I started sitting down for about an hour a day to put my thoughts down, and soon had enough for a book, which I decided to call 
The Malay Dilemma
.

The Malay Dilemma
 
outlines my political philosophy concerning the Malays. As early as my teens, I had noticed that Malays were not involved in businesses in the town of Alor Star, where I grew up. But for a few Indian Muslim shops dealing in spices and one Indian store which ground dried chillies, the retailers were mostly Chinese. They were involved in all kinds of commercial activity, from manufacturing gold and silver jewellery to selling books and tailoring. Chinese coffee shops were also everywhere, whereas Alor Star had only “one and a half” Malay shops. One was in Jalan Langgar and it sold Terengganu
songket
, a rich, hand-woven fabric, and brassware. The half-shop, which only took up half the space of a normal lot, was in Jalan Pekan Melayu and sold magazines and religious books.
 

Pekan Melayu 
means “Malay Town”, but it seemed like a misnomer under the circumstances.
 At the time I thought the problem was a lack of premises, but I was to learn later that it was far more than that. Under the New Economic Policy (NEP), when premises were made readily available to Malays, the number of shops did not increase much.
 

Even at that young age I was troubled by the absence of Malays in commerce. Why could they not have at least a coffee shop in Alor Star? The problem continued to nag at me as I grew older, and I mulled over ways to get Malays into business. During the Japanese Occupation some enterprising Malays formed cooperatives and went into rice wholesaling. The leader was a former government servant who had acquired a shop-house in Jalan Regent, and, for a while, the business was reasonably successful. However, for some reason, it stopped when the British came back.

I thought that upon Independence, the Malay-dominated Government would remedy the situation, but nothing was done. Since 1947, I had been writing in the 
Straits Times
 about the plight of the Malays but besides earning a little pocket money for myself, my articles did not change the attitude of the Malays. When I became a Member of Parliament in 1964, I again wrote about the Malays. I showed my article to a friend, Khalid Awang Osman, a former Member of Parliament and ambassador, who became so excited that he made duplicates and distributed them among UMNO leaders and Malay intellectuals. Many of them commented positively and suggested that something should be done about the matters raised in the article. But nothing was.

The theme of 
The Malay Dilemma
 revolved around the position of the Malays—should they be content with being poor or should they attempt to take ownership of some of the country’s wealth, even if this meant blurring the country’s economic development? As indigenous people, I thought their plight deserved consideration. Mere independence would be meaningless if they derived no benefit from it.

To find the remedy, I sought to identify the deep underlying causes of Malay marginalisation from the modern economy and the reasons for their chronic underperformance. In 
The Malay Dilemma
 I blamed hereditary factors, poor educational facilities, inbreeding, chronic endemic diseases like malaria and tuberculosis, colonial government policies and practices for the poor performance of the Malays.

The New Economic Policy, launched in 1971, addressed most of these problems fairly well. Education is now made available to all, right up to tertiary level. Thousands of scholarships were created for a wide range of disciplines. I also observed that with more young Malays entering tertiary institutions and more marriages taking place outside the extended family, the problem of inbreeding between close relatives was considerably reduced. The general health of the average young Malay also improved so that they became physically able to study or acquire skills through training.

Prior to the NEP there were practically no Malays working as repairmen or mechanics. Now if the electricity supply or an air-conditioner breaks down, the electricians who answer your call are often Malays. It warms my heart to see them confidently hoisting their ladders and brandishing their tools to repair my air-conditioners. At our national car plant, Malays constitute the majority in every department. They design, make clay models, put prototypes together, test them, programme the assembly, and mass-produce the cars, acquiring these intricate and involved skills in less than 17 years after the NEP. The success of the national car proves my contention that Malays are capable of mastering all aspects of modern business. The outstanding accomplishments of the national oil company, Petroliam Nasional Berhad, or PETRONAS, is yet another example of sterling Malay performance. The biggest corporation in Malaysia, it is the only Malaysian company on the Fortune 500 list. It operates not only in Malaysia but in almost 40 other countries, competing with the oil majors, and is involved in every aspect of the petroleum industry, upstream and downstream.

The past 30 years have also seen many Malays appointed as senior executives in major foreign companies and banks. They have done very well, exuding self-confidence and are accepted as equals by their European and other Asian colleagues. Today, this once backward community occupies a broader area of responsibility than just business and commerce. The administration of the whole country is largely in their hands. Under the British, they had only held junior posts, but Independence, growth and democracy demanded highly skilled administrators and Malay officers rose to the occasion. Ours may not be the most efficient administration, but we are certainly one of the best-run former colonies in the world. Our reputation was so good that many developing countries sent their public-sector officials to Malaysia for training.

There are now Malay entrepreneurs and contractors who own billion-dollar companies and operate not only in Malaysia but also in many other countries. It is said that the Malays now have 20 per cent of the total wealth and shares in the country, which would suggest that our national goals, as well as my own hopes in 
The Malay Dilemma,
 are being fulfilled. But that view is misleading. Some 12 per cent of Bumiputera wealth is held in trust by various government institutions, which effectively insulate most Bumiputera to the real risks of doing business. They are not enterprising risk-takers but rather government-coordinated rentier shareholders. The attitude and mentality of the passive beneficiary is not the mental revolution that the Government wants to promote in the Malay and other Bumiputera communities, especially through the NEP.

Our towns and cities also do not reflect any obvious change in Bumiputera participation in business as the urban areas are still largely Chinese. The new buildings that are not Chinese-owned belong not to Malay real estate and property magnates, but to the institutions set up by the Government for the Bumiputera or simply to the Government itself, as state-owned and occupied buildings. The only visible change in our large cities that shows more Bumiputera involvement is the presence of Bumiputera employees in hotels, restaurants and shops. Prior to the NEP there were hardly any Bumiputera among the salespeople, waiters, cooks and other employees in the hotel industry. The Majestic Hotel in Kuala Lumpur and the Railway hotels were all operated and staffed by the Hainanese. This is no longer so today—Malay chefs, looking very confident and smart in their white headgear, cook both Malay and international cuisine with expertise and flair. While this is heartening, there are still hardly any Malay retailers in the towns and cities. The Government’s efforts to attract Malays into the retail business through franchising have not yielded significant results.

The NEP has had its achievements, but they fall short of my hopes. This gap is worrying—it has already been nearly 40 years since the NEP was introduced, and Malay work attitudes and practices leave much to be desired. Why have the special efforts under the NEP failed? It is because of greed and poor money management. When Malays go into business, avarice overtakes prudence and good practices. They go into businesses in which they have no expertise and many fail to do due diligence. They borrow without assessing their creditworthiness, and want to live upon ungrounded hopes rather than sound, hard-headed calculation and self-discipline. Sometimes they even use company money illegally. Perhaps worst of all, they often use a portion of the borrowed capital for personal luxury consumption.

In 
The Malay Dilemma
, and in many public addresses since then, I have tried to highlight the underlying problem in Malay attitudes, work ethics and work culture. These observations bear repeating. The key idea of the NEP was not to see Malays becoming disproportionately wealthy through Government help. The distribution of wealth in society at large needs to be equitable at all levels, including the very highest. Then and only then can antagonistic divisions along economic and racial lines be avoided. If there are wealthy non-Malays, there must also be Malays in the same income band. The goal of getting Malays to own 30 per cent of national wealth may not yet be achievable but a critical mass—at least—must be in the hands of Malays, distributed perhaps not equally, but fairly.

The trouble is the majority of the Malays have not yet learnt the uses of money. For them it remains merely a convenience, a means of exchange for buying or acquiring goods and services, and gaining status. Money is still not regarded as capital that can be managed and invested in order to earn more money. To them, money is merely for consumption, and not to generate more wealth. If the NEP is ever to overcome the original “Malay dilemma”, the Malays will have to learn to manage wealth and treat money as capital.

In my book I blamed the social environment and the Government for Malay underperformance in the modern economy. Now, from fresh observations, I am convinced that much of the problem lies with the Malays themselves. Unfortunately, too many of them still refer to my original analysis and related solutions to overcome their disabling dilemma. Worse still, most Malays have come to think that the affirmative action instituted by the Government in the NEP is a recognition of their “superior” position as the indigenous people of this country. They claim that because they are the 
tuan
 or lords of Malaysia, this discrimination in their favour must be permanent.

This is the new Malay dilemma. Do we take the bull by the horns and tell Malays the truth, or do we refrain for fear of losing their political support? If the affirmative action favouring them is removed, the Malays will likely again become a deprived, dispossessed and marginalised community in their own country. But if we continue with it, we risk making the Malays a permanently dependent people, like the Native Americans. This is a malignant fate, but a different disaster from that which I highlighted in my book.

The NEP has helped the Malays to secure some of the country’s riches for themselves without disrupting, too greatly, the overall economic picture or the rights and expectations of the non-Malays. Could the country have done better economically had it not been bound by the NEP solutions? Perhaps. The economy might, for a while, have registered a higher rate of growth, but social cohesion and political stability would have been in danger. This would have damaged investor confidence and slowed down the longer-term rate of economic growth. A strained and divided society cannot be home to a thriving economy, even in the narrowest of economic terms. The resulting and worsening antagonism between Malays and Chinese would very likely culminate in another May 13, and this second bout of violence may become even worse than the first.