The economic downturn is allowing Malaysia’s leader to chip away at an affirmative action program for Malay Muslims that has been considered virtually untouchable in the past.
Soon after taking office in April, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak scrapped a requirement for 30 percent Malay ownership of companies in certain service industries. This week, he cut the ownership requirement to 12.5 percent for companies that want to list on the stock exchange.
Najib, who is Malay, has also promised to award more government scholarships next year based on academic excellence, rather than racial quotas.
The moves are carefully calculated to avoid angering Malay voters. They touch only a few of the benefits given to Malays, who make up nearly 60 percent of the country’s 28 million people. Still, even these changes would have been unthinkable not long ago. Whether they go further will depend on the Malay reaction and whether the economy recovers.
“What Najib has done is to change the way the game is being played, but the game is still on,” said James Chin, a political science professor at Monash University in Malaysia. “Malays are still being protected and given things on a silver platter.”
Two developments have opened the door to change.
Malaysia has fallen into recession for the first time in a decade, giving Najib political leeway to relax the rules on Malay ownership in a bid to woo foreign investment.
Meanwhile, Najib’s ruling coalition is facing its first severe challenge since coming to power in 1957. And the challenge is fueled in part by anger among ethnic Chinese and Indians about affirmative action for the Malays. Chinese are about 25 percent of the population, and Indians, 8 percent.
The relaxing of affirmative action could help Najib’s coalition, the National Front, regain the support of Chinese and Indian voters, who overwhelmingly deserted the government in elections last year.
The National Front lost its long-standing two-thirds majority in parliament and lost control of five of the Southeast Asian nation’s 13 states, the worst performance in its five decades in power.
“He is hoping to get the economy back on track and win back the non-Malay ground,” said Chin, who thinks Najib may call an election in 2011. “Everything he is doing now is to gear for the next general elections.”
The government introduced affirmative action in 1971, following 1969 riots fueled by Malay discontent with the relative affluence of the ethnic Chinese. Dubbed the New Economic Policy (NEP), the program gives preference to Malays in government contracts, business, jobs, education and housing. It is credited with lifting millions of Malays out of poverty and creating an urban Malay middle class.
The 30 percent ownership requirement was dropped for manufacturing in 1998 to encourage foreign investment in export-oriented factories, which have powered Malaysia’s growth.
Now, Najib is cautiously relaxing the requirement for the service sector.
So far, the reforms have not aroused any open anger among Malays.
Najib describes them as a “tricky balancing act.”
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion