NEW MALAY DILEMMA

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

To Be Or Not To Be A Racist

Many years ago, I found myself working in a small firm with extremely big ambitions. Our firm was a semi franchise of a SME in Europe and our competitors were at least 100 to 200x larger than us.

When we started our firm had a half baked product, no marketing collateral and very few staff. Our competitors had marketing budgets that ran into the millions, products that were tested and deployed through out the world and established relationships with key customers in Malaysia.

Thats when I met this Malay guy called Shahrul (name changed for obvious reasons).

And let me tell you - Shahrul is the best project manager I have ever met.

Shahrul is as Malay as Big Dog, AnotherbrickinWall, Ibrahim Ali and all those folk out there egging this hardline stance. Shahrul prays regularly, does not go partying, was happily married with 2 kids.

In fact he is more Malay than our great Tun Dr Mahathir, but lets leave it at that. Tun Dr Mahahtir is Malay, end of story.

He speaks fluent English and unfortunately those people above may consider him a Melayu Liberal because he is a

1. Hard workers
2. Professional to the core
3. Excellent manager
4. Trustworthy
5. Committed to excellence

Shahrul is the kind of guy who will make sure the juniors are in on a Saturday to do a job if the deadline is Monday and the job is not finished. He hates to give excuses, he hates to stab people in the back, he keeps his word and he is dependable; all of them the Melayu Liberal qualities that seems to cause this blood curdling experience amongst the Mahathirists.

Shahrul is also not a politician and does not get along well with the politico types.

He hates racism, and is generally sympathetic towards KJ.

But Shahrul also had to take some heat on account of his race.

Once, he had to face a big time Chinese Dato' business partner in a meeting and the Chinese Dato' tried to "gertak" him. He just told him "well if you don't trust me, then I quit" and proceeded to pack his bags.

The rest of the meeting room was in total silence.

In the end: The Chinese Dato' backed down. By the way, the project in question was delivered and signed off, within budget and on time.

Now in Tun Dr Mahathir's NEP utopia, Shahrul has 0 chance to progress and that's why instead of actually managing a multi billion ringgit project for Sime Darby (and probably doing it well), he found himself in a small Sdn. Bhd instead doing RM 5 -10 million projects, some of them with international clients.

The reason is that the spirit of the NEP, the spirit that Tun Abdul Razak had in mind when he created the policy was totally ripped out by Dr. Mahathir.

Dato' Sakmongkol told us of a time when a civil servant and a relative of Malaysia's 2nd Prime Minister had "inadvertently" helped himself to a piece of furniture when clearing out of his Government provided lodge. Our Prime Minister then found out about this and probably had this man dragged head first along hot coals.

The fan was duly returned the next day.

Those were the days, when people of all stripes, colours and religions happily voted Barisan Nasional because they understood that the policies were in keeping with the country's interest and our leaders then made sure there was a culture of honesty, transparency and accountability.

And the closer you were to the seat of power, the more accountable you had to be.

22 years after Dr. Mahathir's rule, this spirit was well and truly shattered, destroyed and trampled on. Honesty was replaced with double dealing, integrity with corruption and excellence with apathy.

And in this culture of stabbing people in the back, lying, cheating and all other sort of rubbish, it does not pay to be an honest, trust worthy Malay.

Contracts are dished out to cronies of political masters. These cronies either sub contract the project or take the initial 20% and then leave the project abandoned.

All along, not one, not even one single human being who did that was reprimanded in any meaningful way.

Not 1.

Imagine what this will have on the business ethics of Malays.

Work hard for crumbs or take the easy way out?

And the easy way out to many was to go into politics, leave any sense of dignity by the way side and do what was necessary to get that project, buy that car, marry that starlet and live of the fat of the land.

And Dr. Mahathir defended this. For all the so called gesturing and crocodile tears Dr Mahathir presided over, encouraged and expanded this. This was his way to ensure he held to political power.

He knew the weakness of man and exploited it relentlessly. This weakness is not unique to the Malays, the Indians suffer it too, hence the explanation behind Dato Seri Samy Vellu's continual iron grip on the MIC.

The Chinese know how to counter balance this, and the Anglo Saxons totally reject this. That is why by and large, these 2 cultures have progressed. Both the latter 2 races have learnt from bitter experiences. The Chinese saw their empire crumble, the Anglo Saxons had their fare share of countless of wars, strife and social conflict.

These cronies then went into sub contract with Chinese business partners and this both sets of groups made money. In fact the Chinese generally had no problems in securing these contracts because these Malay cronies only knew other Malay cronies and of course they did not trust their capabilities.

The only person they trusted to do the necessary, honour their word and get the job done was the Chinese, hence the Ali-Baba sort of arrangement.

This is the Malaysia way, they said.

So - where does it leave our good friend Mr. Shahrul?

On one side he is too straight and clean for these disgusting ways. On the other side, he has to face racial discrimination from the Chinese on account of what others have done.

So left kena jam, right also kena jam.

Shahrul's story is not unique.

I have met plenty of Malay entrepreneurs that could not secure prime contracts because they were not politically connected. And the fact that they were not politcially connected was because they spent more time on their business operations, expanding their knowledge and making things more efficient than at the golf course, hotel cafes, PWTC and KTV lounges.

So I do hope that Dr Mahathir will not be racist towards these Malays.

These Malays are not in the political field, and have been excluded from the getting contracts. At the same time, they face discrimination from other races because of the actions of your cronies

To quote him:

9. (...)What will be the Malay stake in the country?

Exactly Tun - what will be the Malay stake in the country?

Could we have an NEP that actually helps the Malays in the same way that Tun Razak had envisaged?

But to answer that question, we have to answer your initial question:

"To be or Not To Be A Racist?"

with another question:

To whom actually are
you being racist towards?

Wengernomics