Meritocracy: Affirmative actions necessary but need not be race-based, says Anwar

The Star

Affirmative actions are necessary for the poor and marginalised to get equal opportunity, said Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim in a question and answer session at the University of California, Berkeley in the US on Tuesday (Nov 14).  Read more at https://tinyurl.com/yjezr48c  WATCH MORE: https://thestartv.com/c/news SUBSCRIBE: https://cutt.ly/TheStar LIKE: https://fb.com/TheStarOnline

Transcript

00:00 [APPLAUSE]

00:05 [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

00:07 So in the United States, we have lots of debates

00:09 about affirmative action.

00:11 In Malaysia, you've had a Buhi Putra policy

00:14 for a very long time.

00:16 How do you think the Buhi Putra policy is likely to roll over

00:19 the next, say, 10 to 20 years?

00:23 Well, I think this debate for the Belka, Cornel West,

00:30 and the other, it's debate fair.

00:34 You see, affirmative action programs

00:37 are necessary for the poor, for the marginalized.

00:43 It need not be necessarily race-based.

00:47 It must be need-based.

00:50 But that's where I shift a bit, in terms

00:53 of our traditional policy.

00:54 Why do we need to continue?

00:59 Because I think Sandell, who is our professor,

01:04 talks about meritocracy.

01:07 Is such a meritocracy fair?

01:10 You talk about competition between Berkeley and Georgetown.

01:16 But you talk about Berkeley and Georgetown,

01:18 when to a remote university or school in Africa,

01:23 there's no justice.

01:26 As Ross alluded to, John Ross, justice has fairness.

01:30 It's not just fair--

01:32 to give equality to everyone.

01:40 Some countries, some schools, even in Malaysia,

01:42 some schools, urban schools, have the best facilities.

01:46 You have to compete with some remote school in the heartland,

01:49 rural heartland.

01:52 There must be some form of additional assistance.

01:55 You call it affirmative action.

01:56 You call it additional support.

02:00 But you cannot have purely meritocracy

02:04 when there is no fairness.

02:07 There's no justice in the city.

02:09 So I think, to my mind, we have to begin

02:13 with a very serious, effective program to eradicate poverty,

02:20 to allow for the marginalized and the poor communities

02:23 to be able to come up and compete.

02:26 But there have been a lot of wastages.

02:29 There's also a psychological buildup there.

02:32 There is the dependency syndrome.

02:35 There are issues that we have to discuss, yes.

02:38 But we must allow for a fair competition.

02:43 We cannot speak purely of meritocracy

02:48 when we do not provide basic, fair opportunities

02:54 for the--

02:56 particularly the poor and the marginalized.

02:58 The only difference, I repeat, is based on need.

03:03 We are poor.

03:04 You are poor.

03:05 You can be a Malay, or a Chinese, or Indian.

03:07 You are poor.

03:08 You are poor.

03:08 We deal with you as an issue of poverty, not race-based.

03:15 Must be need-based.

03:17 But a lot of issues, I think, we discussed in that bell curve,

03:21 which we have to take into consideration,

03:23 because we cannot allow for the society to be totally

03:27 dependent, as you call it, is dependency syndrome,

03:34 that the Egyptian economist, Hamed Amin, referred to.

03:38 [AUDIO OUT]

03:42 [AUDIO OUT]

03:45 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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