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OPINION | The Malays Still Need Protecting After Decades, What Have Their Leaders Been Protecting?
5 Jul 2026 • 1:00 PM MYT
Picture from Google Gemini's Image Generation (Nano Banana)
Tun, with respect: before you ask Malays to vote as Malays, answer this first in your 22 years in politics, and the fortune you built along the way, how many Malays did you personally lift up? Not the country in the abstract. Not slogans about Ketuanan Melayu or Tanah Melayu. Actual people. How many Malay entrepreneurs, professionals, or families can point to their success and say, "Tun Mahathir did this for me, from his own hands, his own money, his own mentorship"?
If the answer is a long list, let's hear it. If it isn't, then the call to "protect the Malays" by voting along racial lines starts to look less like conviction and more like a fishing line cast every election cycle, baited with identity, reeled in for power.
The same question belongs at Hadi Awang's door. You have spent decades telling Malays that voting for you protects Islam and protects the race. Fair enough but decades is a long time. How many Malays, under your influence and your party's rule in the states you've controlled, have actually been "spoiled" rather than uplifted? How many opportunities squandered, how many communities left no further ahead than when you started? If the protection was real, we should be able to see it. Where is it?
Here's the part that really doesn't sit right with me: why does a majority need this much protecting in the first place?
Malays are roughly 60% of this country. They are not a besieged minority clinging to survival in someone else's homeland. So when leaders frame every election as an existential fight to "protect" the Malays, I have to ask protect them from what, exactly? From the 40%? From competition? Minorities in this country don't hold the levers of government, the civil service, the GLCs, or the land. If anyone should be nervous about being out-voted or out-maneuvered, logically it isn't the majority.
And here's the part that really undercuts the whole argument: the Chinese and Indian communities built what they have with none of this scaffolding. No quotas reserved for them in university intake. No guaranteed equity carve-outs in GLC land deals. No civil service preference. They grew their businesses, sent their children to university, and built generational wealth largely on their own precisely the "sink or swim" conditions that Malay leaders insist would be catastrophic for the Malays. If the absence of protection didn't stop them, the theory that Malays cannot survive without it deserves a much harder look.
And Tun, you know this better than most, because you lived the contradiction yourself. In 2018, it wasn't Malay unity alone that put you back in Putrajaya for a second stint as prime minister it was Pakatan Harapan, a coalition anchored by DAP, a party with a Chinese and Indian-majority support base. You needed their votes, their machinery, and their trust to become PM. So when it served your political comeback, working across race was not a threat to Ketuanan Melayu it was the plan. It's only now, years later, that race has become the thing voters are told they cannot cross.
And it's not as if the protections haven't already been built in, generation after generation. Malays have had preferential access to education from school intake to university quotas for decades. They've had preferential access to business licenses, government contracts, and public listings. And now, under the updated Properties Acquisition Guidelines, private companies buying GLC or GLIC properties worth RM20 million and above must hand over 50% Bumiputera equity, up from 30%. That's not a small adjustment that's a doubling down, a fresh injection of economic protection layered on top of everything that came before.
So here's the honest question nobody in power wants to answer: if all this scaffolding has been in place for this long, why hasn't it produced the outcome it was supposed to produce? Why, after all these decades of privilege in classrooms, in universities, in start-up capital, in property, in equity do we still hear that Malays haven't "developed"? Even small businesses today have more grants, more set-asides, more government support earmarked for Bumiputera entrepreneurs than for anyone else. If a boost this large, sustained this long, still isn't enough, maybe the problem was never a lack of protection. Maybe it's worth asking what happened to all the protection that was already given and who, exactly, it actually benefited.
Because if the answer is a handful of well-connected names who now stand on stage telling the rest of the Malays to vote out of fear, then the "protection" was never really about the community. It was about the people asking for the vote.
Annan Vaithegi writes, “a leader's greatest achievement is not convincing people they are forever at risk, but building a society so capable that fear is no longer its political currency.”
Tun, with respect: before you ask Malays to vote as Malays, answer this first in your 22 years in politics, and the fortune you built along the way, how many Malays did you personally lift up? Not the country in the abstract. Not slogans about Ketuanan Melayu or Tanah Melayu. Actual people. How many Malay entrepreneurs, professionals, or families can point to their success and say, "Tun Mahathir did this for me, from his own hands, his own money, his own mentorship"?
If the answer is a long list, let's hear it. If it isn't, then the call to "protect the Malays" by voting along racial lines starts to look less like conviction and more like a fishing line cast every election cycle, baited with identity, reeled in for power.
The same question belongs at Hadi Awang's door. You have spent decades telling Malays that voting for you protects Islam and protects the race. Fair enough but decades is a long time. How many Malays, under your influence and your party's rule in the states you've controlled, have actually been "spoiled" rather than uplifted? How many opportunities squandered, how many communities left no further ahead than when you started? If the protection was real, we should be able to see it. Where is it?
Here's the part that really doesn't sit right with me: why does a majority need this much protecting in the first place?
Malays are roughly 60% of this country. They are not a besieged minority clinging to survival in someone else's homeland. So when leaders frame every election as an existential fight to "protect" the Malays, I have to ask protect them from what, exactly? From the 40%? From competition? Minorities in this country don't hold the levers of government, the civil service, the GLCs, or the land. If anyone should be nervous about being out-voted or out-maneuvered, logically it isn't the majority.
And here's the part that really undercuts the whole argument: the Chinese and Indian communities built what they have with none of this scaffolding. No quotas reserved for them in university intake. No guaranteed equity carve-outs in GLC land deals. No civil service preference. They grew their businesses, sent their children to university, and built generational wealth largely on their own precisely the "sink or swim" conditions that Malay leaders insist would be catastrophic for the Malays. If the absence of protection didn't stop them, the theory that Malays cannot survive without it deserves a much harder look.
And Tun, you know this better than most, because you lived the contradiction yourself. In 2018, it wasn't Malay unity alone that put you back in Putrajaya for a second stint as prime minister it was Pakatan Harapan, a coalition anchored by DAP, a party with a Chinese and Indian-majority support base. You needed their votes, their machinery, and their trust to become PM. So when it served your political comeback, working across race was not a threat to Ketuanan Melayu it was the plan. It's only now, years later, that race has become the thing voters are told they cannot cross.
And it's not as if the protections haven't already been built in, generation after generation. Malays have had preferential access to education from school intake to university quotas for decades. They've had preferential access to business licenses, government contracts, and public listings. And now, under the updated Properties Acquisition Guidelines, private companies buying GLC or GLIC properties worth RM20 million and above must hand over 50% Bumiputera equity, up from 30%. That's not a small adjustment that's a doubling down, a fresh injection of economic protection layered on top of everything that came before.
So here's the honest question nobody in power wants to answer: if all this scaffolding has been in place for this long, why hasn't it produced the outcome it was supposed to produce? Why, after all these decades of privilege in classrooms, in universities, in start-up capital, in property, in equity do we still hear that Malays haven't "developed"? Even small businesses today have more grants, more set-asides, more government support earmarked for Bumiputera entrepreneurs than for anyone else. If a boost this large, sustained this long, still isn't enough, maybe the problem was never a lack of protection. Maybe it's worth asking what happened to all the protection that was already given and who, exactly, it actually benefited.
Because if the answer is a handful of well-connected names who now stand on stage telling the rest of the Malays to vote out of fear, then the "protection" was never really about the community. It was about the people asking for the vote.
Annan Vaithegi writes, “a leader's greatest achievement is not convincing people they are forever at risk, but building a society so capable that fear is no longer its political currency.”
