KUALA LUMPUR, May 2 ― Malays must prove they can match or outperform their peers from other races to justify the continuation of a Bumiputera preferential policy, Umno lawmaker Datuk Nur Jazlan Mohamed said.

The Pulai MP conceded that the government's decades-old affirmative action plan has seen limited success, instead fuelling greater resentment among the country's minority Chinese whose students are persistently sidelined for public scholarships despite being top scorers.

“The government has to inject meritocracy into the system even if we want to maintain affirmative action,” Nur Jazlan told The Malay Mail Online amid renewed debate sparked by Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad's latest remarks on the hot button topic.

The country's longest-serving prime minister told reporters earlier this week that despite preferential treatment for the Bumiputera, the Chinese and Indian communities have had more than enough space to build their wealth and establish themselves in high-income professions such as doctors and lawyers.

Telecommunications tycoon Tan Sri T. Ananda Krishnan, an ethnic Indian, and Malay magnate Tan Sri Syed Mokhtar Al-Bukhary are the only non-Chinese to make it to the Forbes list of Malaysia's top 10 richest people.

However, Dr Mahathir's son and oil baron, Datuk Mokhzani Mahathir, was included in another list of top 10 richest by the Malaysian Business magazine.

Nur Jazlan also argued that rapid urbanisation had also blurred the socio-economic stereotypes that had formed over the years, making it much harder to identify the country's destitute by race alone.

He attributed the widely-held perception that Chinese Malaysians are richer than their Malay countrymen to the rise in city property prices where the largely urban Chinese had made their home decades ago.

In comparison, the Malays mostly owned properties in rural areas, which have not appreciated at the same rate, Nur Jazlan said.

“Affirmative action for the Malays should yield superior results and create generations of able Malays to earn the high-income jobs, but there is limited success,” The Johor federal lawmaker said, when contacted.

The Barisan Nasional (BN) government mooted the National Economic Policy (NEP) in 1971 with the noble aim of levelling the socio-economic disparities between the largely-urban Chinese and rural Malays as well as other indigenous Bumiputera within two decades.

It ended officially in 1990, but key features of the racial policy to inspire and propel the native sons of the soil over the racial wall remain under various guises.

Last year, the Najib administration launched the RM30 billion Bumiputera Economic Empowerment Programme to give the community a financial leg up the corporate ladder.

Wan Saiful Wan Jan, chief executive of think tank, the Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs, told The Malay Mail Online that the conception that the Chinese are among Malaysia's richest, showed the failure of government interference.

“The more government intervene to help a particular ethnic group, evidence shows it doesn't work, and empirical evidence shows that the groups that don't receive help are prosperous," the economist said.

“The reality is a group of elites controlling the economy, we really need to move away from the conversation, which ethnic groups they belong to,” Wan Saiful said.