Tun Mahathir's Blame Game

Our country is rich with natural resources and human capital. The then Malaya was an epicenter of economic activities long before the Western explorers began their voyage. As early as the 16th century, the Malacca Strait, which was predominantly controlled by the Sultanate of Malacca, was a strategic trading passage – linking the Pacific and Indian Oceans during the height of the global spice trade.

Malacca’s port served as an economic magnet in the Nusantaran region as it thrived to be a multicultural hub – attracting the crowds of Chinese, Arabs, Indians, Persians, Turks, Portuguese, Dutch and Siamese, along with the majority local Malays. Its reputation as a crossroad of resource and culture later became a cocktail of promise and peril. The city of Malacca was conquered by the Portuguese on 24 April 1511, before eventually the Dutch and the British in the 17th century.

The colonialists’ extractive policy had neglected Malacca’s soul and spirit. Malacca’s Muslim inhabitants, who were predominantly Malay, were massacred or sold into slavery. The Malay people were rampaged of their properties. Those who stayed remained at the mercy of their new “landlords”, with little to no chance of climbing up the economic ladder.

Wary of the cruelty and brashness of their uninvited guests, the Malays had preferred to remain in the fringes of the society. They had practiced self-sustenance to survive the widespread ordeal. The Malays had valued their freedom more than accumulating wealth by collaborating with the colonialists.

As the colonialists were unable to procure the Malays’ service to produce the goods needed for their home countries in Europe, they had decided to “import” additional help from abroad – mostly economic migrants from China and India. That was not without laying their own judgments against the Malays as “lazy” for their refusal to cooperate towards the aims and goals of their presence in Southeast Asia.

According to Royal Professor Ungku Aziz, the British had failed to understand that the nature of the Malays’ economic activities in the rural areas. The work carried out by the Malays was back breaking. They were also subjected to all types of unkind weather situations. No lazy individual could face up to such a situation.

After more than a hundred years of British exploitation and social engineering, the economic pie of newly independent Malaysia was skewed towards the early migrants who had mostly settled in urban areas. The economic divide between the Malays and non-Malays were disparagingly wide that its effect is felt until today.

Instead of acknowledging the root causes of the problems, our former Prime Minister, Tun. Dr Mahathir, had instead recycled the baseless colonial rhetoric that Malays are “lazy and incompetent”. Dr. Mahathir had considered this “unchanged mindset” as one of his biggest failures during his premiership. Noting the historical context and almost three decades of Mahathir as the Prime Minister, it is a lame-duck excuse to instead blame the Malays for his own leadership weakness.

Even at the age of 94, Dr. Mahathir is still unrepentant in making his own brethren the “butt of all jokes”.