The heated debate has caught the administration of PM Anwar Ibrahim in a bind, as his coalition was voted into power on a multi-racial platform.
Yet the government that espouses the so-called “Madani” concept – moderate, modern Islam – cannot afford to alienate the majority-Malay population that largely sees the NEP as sacrosanct and UiTM as a bastion of bumiputera education that must be protected. The Anwar administration in the end tried to douse the controversy by amending the Medical Act 1971, which will allow doctors who obtained specialist training abroad to register as medical specialists. The Bill is targeted to be tabled in the coming Parliament session in June.
Many Malaysian Malays still staunchly defend the NEP, believing that it remains the best way to improve their economic status. And commentators say it has succeeded in raising a confident, professional Malay class of doctors to bankers and lawyers, and vastly reduced poverty. The NEP was launched by his father, Malaysia’s second prime minister Razak Hussein, following the 1969 race riots that killed hundreds of people and forever changed Malaysian politics.
Official figures for 2022 say some 1.13 million Malaysians are based in Singapore – 61 per cent of the country’s entire diaspora – of whom just under 40 per cent are working in a job. Retired University of Malaya professor of political economy Edmund Terence Gomez said that part of the original plan for the NEP was to educate the poor, particularly rural Malays, and ensure that they received good education in high-class schools. This led to the formation of special Malay boarding schools known as Maktab Rendah Sains Mara and UiTM.