Asia Sentinel – Revisiting Malaysia’s Social Contract
Malaysia introduced the 20 year 1070-90 New Economic Policy in late 1969. The NEP pledged to eliminate the identification of race with economic function and place of residence; eradicate poverty irrespective of race, color and creed; and ensure that the Malays and other indigenous races own, control and manage at least 30 percent of the nation’s corporate economy by 1990.
But deviations soon set in and there was rampant nepotism, cronyism and corruption to sabotage the NEP and send the economy into a tailspin by the early 1980s. The NEP had to be scaled back to bring the economy out of a recession in the mid-1980s.)
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A serious deviation of the social contract was the misinterpretation by the right wingers that it was a carte blanche for Ketuanan Melayu –Malays first — Malay political dominance and supremacy. This was anathema to Lee. Many saw Ketuanan Melayu as nothing less than an unabashed amalgamation of the Nazism of Hitler’s Germany and the Apartheid of South Africa’s white supremacists with the caste system of the Brahmins of India. Surely, such a system could not be good for anyone, even including the great majority of the Malays themselves.
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Read:
NEP abuses by the BN government
NEP was bastardised to benefit select few
Umno implemented NEP for all races, or for Umnoputras ?
Umno full of Yes-men and hypocrites
Umno politicians in for financial gains
Umno rebuked for its arrogance, corruption and shrill racist rhetoric
really happened we shouldn’t lose sight of one central fact – the refusal of our political elite to come to terms with shifts in political power.
Datuk Bung Mokhtar Radin (BN-Kinabatangan) said that despite giving huge financial allocations to Kelantan, Barisan Nasional still could not capture the state.
