Economics, Featured Work, Malaysia, Politics - Wednesday, October 21, 2009 12:43 - 0 Comments

Change is coming for the sons of the soil

The Spectator – Business

On June 30, in a ballroom in Kuala Lumpur’s Shangri-La hotel, Malaysia’s prime minister Najib Razak made a landmark announcement. It doesn’t sound much: the abolition of a long-standing rule that 30% of equity in new share offerings must be allocated to Bumiputras, or ethnic Malays. But both practically and symbolically, it was an important moment.

Najib, around 100 days into his office, had abolished part of the New Economic Policy (NEP), an affirmative action program put in place by his father, Prime Minister Tun Abdul Razak, in 1971. Implemented in an environment of increasing social tension in which the economic gap between the Malay majority and the Chinese minority (about 65 and 25% of the population respectively, with Indians making up most of the remainder) was becoming increasingly stark, the NEP sought to put 30% of the economy in Bumiputra hands through a range of measures from government job allocation to cheap housing. In its explicit expression that the country’s true locals needed protection and favouritism – the word Bumiputras means “sons of the soil” – it has become a key document in understanding Malaysia’s social fabric, and no step towards removing it is taken lightly. Continue…

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