The huge allocations in the Budget running into billions will not reach the poor Malays though they were intended for them; the elite will siphon off much of it. More than 46 years of seemingly active and aggressive effort and endeavour since 1974 to lift the poor, rural Malays had failed miserably, simply because much of the aid didn’t reach them but went into the pockets of greedy politicians. This so-called approach to uplift the poor Malays has failed miserably and only created hundreds of Malay millionaires who are politicians.
The Malays are allocated RM11.1 bn for “bumiputera development”, compared to RM100m for the Indian community’s socioeconomic development… The RM100m allocation for the Indian community works out to RM50 per person per year, or RM4 per month or a miserable 14 sen per day!
The estimated 7.4 million Chinese are treated no better. They are provided RM177m. A simple calculation reveals the miserly sum the Chinese are entitled to under the Budget: RM24 per person per year; RM2 per month or 7 sen per day!..
A third group of people – the most exploited in their country of origin – are the Orang Asli, the most dispossessed and deprived of all citizens of Malaysia. They do not receive what they are entitled to as the original people of Malaya. It is to our utter shame that they continue to be exploited, neglected and marginalised.
Anyone with a Malaysian passport is allowed Malaysian citizenship only. Yet the present government blatantly admits its determination to discriminate based on a budget that sets out to define citizens not by need or contribution, but merely according to ethnicity.
It then seeks to create a caste system based on that ethnicity to benefit those born within one group of Malaysians over those born within another. Non Malays have only one country to call their own, but they are hereby categorised as second class.
In a modern and supposedly democratic country it is shameful, backward and astonishing that a budget should seek to hand out wealth in such a deliberate and discriminatory manner based on race with one community favoured exponentially above all others. No wonder Malaysia has been exposed as the second most racist country in the world in a recent perception index.
The ultimate irony, as this article points out, is that the favouring of Malays appears based on a concept of them being ‘original’ inhabitants as opposed to ‘immigrants’. Whereas, in fact, the original Orang Asli remain the most discriminated against group of all the races in Malaysia, just as their final territories are being wrenched away by greedy business interests who are hoovering up the country’s remaining resources.
It is the deeply impoverished Orang Asli who need most but gain least from this overtly and shamefully racist budget, concocted by a handful of corrupt Malay power-mongers in order to curry favour with that community whilst at the same time channelling the actual benefits into their own pockets.
Experience tells us the majority of Malays will end up with precious little, just like everybody else, from these handouts, despite the claims that they will be privileged by this toxic budget.