Thursday, October 25, 2007

To Enhance Malay Competitiveness

What an eye-opening & thought-provoking article. Some points are disturbing, some are controversial but some, we should sit down and give them some thoughts. Please read word by word if you have the time. Worth every second.


Extracted from the book "To Digress A Little"
Author: Syed Akbar Ali

Quote:

… to get back to the topic of science and technology, the religionists are well and capable of reversing human civilization back to the Stone Age at any point in history. Afghanistan is a prime example. The religionists there almost totally destroyed their civilization in the 21st century.

In today’s Malaysia we see the increasing influence of these religionists giving rise to a larger number of people who cannot think logically or use their common sense. In the 1970s they even convinced some people to throw their television sets into rivers. As I have described in other chapters, today even trained doctors are mixing religious hocus pocus with modern medicine. This is a new trend. We did not see this type of confusion before. Then we had the tragedy of the Al Maunah who raided a military armory and killed innocent lives. They were led by a not too smart religious begger who convinced his less smart followers to part with Rm 2,000 each to buy Made in Indonesia knives from him. He had told the most gullible followers that the knives, which had some inscriptions on them, had magical “kebal” powers. He did not tell them that the knives were actually imported by a handicraft shop at the Central Market for Rm 200 a piece. Yet the Maunah had over 1,700 members, including from the armed forces and civil servants. I believe if the price of the knives had been slightly cheaper, the Maunah may have gathered even more lost souls. Religion, especially the illogical and false variety, has the singular capacity to reverse civilisation completely.

The glorious Islamic civilisation that was based on science and technology has been completely eclipsed by the confused religionists. Today the confused souls who wishfully think they are the inheritors of the Prophet’s mission are following a confused hocus pocus which keeps them downtrodden, violent and poor. The food they eat, the cars they drive, the clothes they wear and the medicines that help cure their sicknesses – all of it has to be manufactured for them by the people whom they term as “disbelievers”. Some Arabs are able to buy all these comforts only because some oil is found under their desert sands. Without the oil, what will the Arabs do? Allah has forsaken the Arabs for their violence and foolishness, But they are convinced that the same Allah will somehow bless them with paradise in recognition of this same violence and foolishness. What a terrible confused lot.

If the Malays too do not grasp the wonderful upliftment of the Quran and Islam but instead choose to hang their fate on the influences of the narrow minded religionists then their future is really dim. They will persist in being unable to compete and maybe becoming dirt poor like the non oil producing Arab countries. They will end up in dire poverty.

The sad thing is sometimes the Malays do not know when they are poor. Confused religionist like Nik Aziz Nik Mat the PAS politician further confuse the Malays by misleading them to think that is ok to be poor in the “duniawi” or earthly life because they are going to be rich in the Afterlife.

…… Quality reading is extremely important to break the poverty cycle. It is better for Malay children to read and understand…… Many Malay children read………mind warping type religious books which do not follow any set standards which only prolongs the human being in poverty and stupidity.

The path to making the Malays competitive lies in the future. It’s too late to make the present crop of Malay adults competitive. We must focus now and urgently on the Malay children……… Non Malay children, especially the Chinese kids grow up to be very competitive……..

In Bangsar we see Malay children coming home after school, eat lunch, change their clothes and then they are driven in Volvos, BMW’s and Mercedes to religious classes at the local religious school. They spend up to three hours a day, five days a week attending these religious classes. One wonders why their religion is so difficult such that it requires hours on instruction a day for years on end for them to understand their religion.

And what exactly do these kids learn at their religious classes? Amongst other things they are taught that when you enter the toilet you should step in with your left foot. When you leave the toilet you should step out on your right foot. And other such training. In truth Allah has made Islam so easy and simple to understand and uphold. You do not need to attend hours of classes everyday for years on end to understand Islam.

But what do the Chinese kids do with the same amount of time available to them? They may attend tuition classes, computer classes, art lessons, music or ballet lessons. Nowadays Chinese kids also attend Japanese language lessons. There are only 24 hours in a day. So while the Malay kids lepak, chat on the Internet, get caught up with Akademi Fantasia and Sure Heboh or listen to their guru agama, the Chinese kids spend the same amount of time pursuing other things that are of more practical value for their future. Is it any surprise than that when they both grow up the Malay kids end up working for the Chinese kids? ……………..

Substance is more important than form or the isi is much more important than the kulit. We really need to teach the children the isi of good values but to date this is not being achieved very well. The girls may wear ‘tudung’ and ‘tutup aurat’ but what exactly goes on inside their heads is sometimes frightening. Lets take another real life example. A pleasant young Malay girl of about 20 years who wears a ‘tudung’, carries herself well and has a full time job wants to marry a young man. But the young man is a drug addict and is not always employed. Despite being advised the girl is unfazed with her fiance’s drug problem because she says ‘dia main main saja’. And she says ‘artis pun sama juga’. It is a comfort for her that since some artistes do drugs, why can’t her young fiancé? After all its ‘main main saja’. Young people are not imbibing enough of good values. They are being brainwashed with mere form. Pandang kulit saja, isi tak ada.

In 1990 when I was a junior banker, my boss in the Government controlled bank was a member of the Tabligh cult. The Tabligh cult believes that it is good to use your fingers to eat shared meals from a common tray. They believe that special juices flow out of your fingertips to add flavour to the food (finger flavour?). I thought at that time that such ridiculous beliefs would just fade away.

But fifteen years on my seventeen year old son who is a fifth former at the Victoria Institution a ‘sekolah kawalan’ repeated exactly the same story. He said that his guru agama told his class this story about special enzymes oozing out of your gingers to flavour the food. And his pure science Malay classmates were totally mesmerised by what the guru agama had said. This is what is really going on with our kids folks. No matter how much education, science and technology or development we achieve, the confused religionist have the si
ngular capacity to put all that to waste. They can turn the clock back to the Stone Age at any time, even in this 21st Century – irrespective of the status of our scientific progress.

One also cannot help but notice that the guru agama are teaching Malay school children religion based prejudices that is contributing to a renewed racial polarisation in our country. School children are even being told that reading English books may lead them to ‘jadi kristian’. In my son’s primary school an ustazah would bring cakes to the class for Teacher’s Day and hand feed them to all her charges except to the non Muslim children. The non Muslim children would get their cakes placed on their desk top……..

In our country, this type of time wasting attitudes do not contribute towards making the Malay or Muslim child a better person or a more competitive person especially in an environment where they are up against globalisation and other stiff competition. Some of the kids learn to be prejudiced and disrespectful against other races while at the same time imagining a religious superiority that simply does not exist. Then they grow up and get hit by the reality shocks that the Chinese and others are more successful in life because they are more open to the whole world. But it is too late. The young Malay adults may now withdraw into their racial and religious cocoons again. Then the whole cycle repeats itself.

Even without any negative religious influences, I have seen this a dozen times. Young Malay kids with even passing grades who were given scholarships to study in the United States or the United Kingdom come back with great expectations and great hopes. Then many of them discover that they can only work in the Government departments and earn their civil servant scale monthly salary cheques. After a few years they just get stuck in the rut of being a salary earner.

Others may work in the private sector – especially the bumiputera owned corporations or GLCs where they may earn a bit more than in Government service. If they get into politics or become ‘connected’ they may get into the “apa yang kita bagi kita boleh ambil balik” loop and strike it rich. Others will fill up the bumiputera quotas at the foreign owned multi national corporations or Chinese owned companies. If they whistle the right tunes they will enjoy promotions and have job security. Otherwise they will likely drop out of the race.

There is also a confused and distorted belief that just by educating people, we will all live happily ever after. This is true only to a certain extent. Now there is a vision that every Malay family should produce at least two professionals – meaning doctors, lawyers and engineers. Hence our planners plot the number of Malay undergraduates, masters degree holders and Malay PhD holders with the hope that a sufficient number of Masters degrees and PhDs will automatically right all the wrongs and overcome the racial imbalances in the country. This wrong understanding also led to some wrong policy planning of university intake quotas whereby it was made more difficult for Chinese and other non Malays to obtain places in universities.

Manufacturing Malay graduates without enhancing their competitive skills only produced unemployable Malay graduates and legions of lethargic Civil Servants………..

Education alone is not going to help the Malays. Although wives with a steady Government job do seem to be an asset for them, they must learn to compete fairly with the rest of the market.

On the other hand restricting Chinese from varsity places was not only a perbuatan berdosa but it did not stop the Chinese from getting whatever education they needed and it also increased the competitive spirit of the Chinese.

Malay doctors with years of experience are still struggling because of poor management skills required to operate private hospitals and clinics. Malay girls make up more than half of the medical students at our universities but according to one professor of medicine about a quarter of them will choose to become housewives despite their medical qualifications. This is a terrible waste of highly trained human resources. And few of them will end up marrying doctors or professionals. The planners have to take this into consideration too.

Despite a university degree the Malays lack English language skills – a major impediment of functioning on the real world. They may also hold degrees in exotic areas of geography or statistics which have little practical value in the job market. At the shop assistant level the Bangladeshi who can do quick calculations and can remember the location of the goods for sale has a better advantage over their Malay university educated colleagues if they cannot remember such basic things.

And poor English language skills still denies the Malays the greatest wealth of all – the success to fast changing information and new knowledge.

Yet the Malays create numerous excuses to prolong their crutches mentality. One of them is to withdraw into their religious and racial cocoons. ……..

The other cocoon is the racial cocoon like the Dewan Perniagaan Islam, the Melayu Cyber community and the Malay business networks which seem to promote a distinct race based identity. This will not help the Malays or anyone else for that matter become more competitive in the long term. Firstly there never was an independent Malay economy that could sustain itself. This type of race and religious identity is a poor manifestation of a low self esteem. “Lets us losers form our own club”……

Flogging the race identity over the past 30 years of the New Economic Policy has kidded the Malay horse. The racial disparities are widening again. It is no more a disparity between the haves and have nots. It is a widening disparity between the ‘can compete’ and the ‘cannot compete’. If we embark on the same ‘distributive’ policies for the next 30 years we would fall into the rut of Fool’s Law again. ………..

Instead the Malays are taught to prolong their ‘feel good’ racial cocoons. When the young man from Penang of mamak origins like me swam across the English Channel he was made a Dato. And he had the full backing of the Minister of Sports as well as the UMNO Youth machinery to support him. When a young Chinese boy who was no less than a medical student at Cambridge University repeated the same feat all on his own – without much support from anyone – little was said or spoken about him.

When the Malaysia Boleh team went up to conquer Mount Everest the Malay member of the team could not make it to the top. Two Indians in the team made it. But when they came back there was no Datukship waiting for them. If only the Malay boy had made it to the top he would have most certainly been made a Datuk. This is the low self esteem of the racial cocoon again. ……………..

In the book Lee Kuan Yew – The Man And His Ideas (Han, Fernandez and Sumiko pg 256), Mr. Lee says, “One great obstacle of a rapid and orderly political development of Malaya has bee and still is the Malayan habit of ignoring unpalatable facts and avoiding unpleasant controversy”. This is a sad but true observation by Mr. Lee Kuan Yew. What is devastating is that Mr. Lee made this observation in January 1950 – 55 years ago – when he was among other Malayans struggling for Independence.

How are we going to bring about effective change if even after 55 years we avoid tackling difficult issues head on? And now the present Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi has been identified with a "feel good" mentality. To him everything should be "feel good". Don⊀?t rock the boat. Don’t ask difficult questions. Everything is ok. Maybe if we bury our heads deep enough in the sand, all our problems will go away.

But here is yet another small example. A Malay and Chinese in the Bagan Serai area operate backhoes…………… When there is a job to be done the Chinese backhoe operator can turn up at seven in the morning with his backhoe all gunned up and ready to go. The Chinese backhoe operator would have checked his hydraulic fluids, topped up the engine oil, filled up on diesel and checked tyre pressure the evening before. If the construction site is distant he would have even scouted the area on his motorbike the day before – just to make sure he get there in time in the morning.

The Malay backhoe operator however does not appear at the site even as late as ten in the morning. He has attended the early morning “sembahyang subuh” at 5:30 am in the surau and listened to the “kuliyah subuh” that followed. Then he went home and fell asleep again because he is tired because he did not get enough sleep. He gets up later and only then checks the engine oil, the hydraulic fluid and so on. Finally he arrives at the construction site by 10 am to be scolded by the construction supervisor. His backhoe is hired on a daily basis by the construction site. Because he is late, the construction supervisor just tells him that his backhoe is not needed anymore. Since the Malay backhoe operator rented his backhoe he cannot pay the rental anymore. He has to return the backhoe to its Chinese owner who them rents it to another Chinese who has had uninterrupted sleep and can turn up for work at seven in the morning. The Malay does not really lose much sleep over this because at the “kuliyyah subuh” he heard about takdir (fate) and the temptations of the duniawi (earthly life) and heard promises of the akhirat (the afterlife).

Obviously you do not need a New Economic Policy here to give the Malay a free backhoe. You also cannot restrict the Chinese by insisting that he get a Bumiputera partner before he can own and operate a backhoe. You need a New Competitive Policy to make sure the Malay backhoe operator appears at the construction site at 7 am all gunned up and ready to work.

Whatever that needs to be done must be done to make this happen. A complete overhaul of everything that the Malay does from sunrise till he sleeps in the night has to be relooked in light of meeting the changed and changing environment.

This requires honesty and courage.

just my 2cents at 10:18 PM |

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