UMNO Youth say bring back NEP. I say...
...go screw yourselves.
Hishammuddin Hussein, said today,
The NEP definition itself should be reapplied as part of the national development policy, so that the Malays would be empowered and not sidelined from now till the year 2020.
What national policy in place now sidelines the Malays? Please tell me. Could one of them be meritocracy for university entry?
While I am not against the NEP as proposed by the Razak government, I think it has outlived its use. This statement comes from myself, an alumnus of the Tun Razak Foundation Leadership Programme.
I say, why continue to give a crutch to the Malays? Do we really want to convince them that they are permanently crippled? The affects of NEP should be studied for all that it was good for and all that it was not.
The government should address the many problems the NEP created in the first place. There are so many, but I will name one very apparent one: the mass annual braindrain of local talent overseas.
The government cannot continue to deny equal opportunity for university admission to non-bumiputras and at the same time label those who pursue higher education overseas 'unpatriotic'.
Higher education in Malaysia is definitely in crisis. I have never thought of pursuing a degree locally. Not trying to sound elitist, but I doubt my parents were thinking of that either. A lot of urban Chinese feel the need to make it possible for their children to study overseas.
It is also not uncommon for them to tell their kids, "Try to get a PR so that we can have a choice to retire there ok?"
The situation in Malaysia seems gloomy, who can blame them for feeling so. I am worried about the quality of education my children will receive. Heard of the idiom 'Pay peanuts get monkeys'? We pay our primary school teachers a starting salary of RM900. I don't want to send my kids to monkeys who will eventually tell my kids to take tuition.
We are facing crisis in almost every field, but education gets the most limelight.
So I say to the UMNO Youth, please invent new solutions to new problems. Don't you all have brains to think for yourselves? Do you think echoing ideas from a bygone era (by leaders of superior virtue and ability to yourselves) makes you more Malay? Dream on.
Other races are not robbing the Malays of anything. They are merely struggling in life to survive in a dog-eat-dog world, where they are disadvantaged by government policy. You need a university education, we ALSO need a university education. We are not going to sacrifice our dreams and goals in life to assist you, at our own expense, to succeed when you are not interested to.
What I am saying here is the NEP policies has unfortunately caused Malaysia to lose both billions of Ringgit in foreign exchange per year and invaluable brain-talents. For example in Australia, they are proud to gloat that their second biggest export comes from the education industry thanks partly to the shortsightedness of governments like Malaysia.
Remove the crutch. Let your people stand tall.
Stop UMNO Youth from robbing Malaysia of its human resources.