KUALA LUMPUR, March 9 — Putrajaya should bring back elements of the defunct New Economic Policy (NEP) to help boost Bumiputera equity and strengthen national unity, said Bumiputera rights group Pemikir.

Pemikir president Tan Sri Abdul Aziz Yassin said the NEP was introduced by the country’s second prime minister Tun Abdul Razak Hussein following the May 13, 1969 racial riots with the twin objectives of achieving national unity and closing the economic gap between different races.

“I think unless we achieve that and eradicate poverty, we can never have real national unity

That’s why I urge the government to include the objectives of NEP in the NEM,” the former Muar MP told reporters yesterday.

“NEP have proved successful over 20 years. National unity was very coherent. Now when we don’t have NEP, the unity of the people become very brittle,” he also said.

The problem with the New Economic Model (NEM) mooted by current Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak was its lack of elements from the predecessor that would promote economic equity among the Bumiputera, Aziz said.

He pointed out that there was a requirement for Malay participation in projects during Razak’s time, unlike today where investors are free to set up businesses without the Bumiputera having a stake.

When approached later, Aziz told Malay Mail Online that a key element of the NEP was to have joint-ventures between the Malays and non-Malays in any business projects, with a requirement that 30 per cent of shares in a company must belong to Bumiputera.

The NEP was successful in raising Bumiputera equity “to some measure”, but Malaysia has yet to reach its goal of 30 per cent equity for Bumiputera, he said.

He dismissed the Bumiputera Agenda unveiled by Najib as being inadequate, suggesting that the government set up a seed fund of RM10 billion instead for Bumiputeras to borrow for investment in business opportunities.

Earlier during a forum, he had said that he believed that economic imbalance would be a stumbling block to national unity.

“I am of the view that national unity cannot be achieved if one race’s economic achievement is more than the other races’. More so if the poor race comes from the Malay race,” he said.

He confirmed his view that poverty must be eradicated across all races as “poverty has no boundary”.

“In fact we are thinking of asking the government to institute an authority to manage poverty by an Act of Parliament so proper research can be done on how to eradicate poverty,” he said.

The Pemikir forum yesterday titled “Politics and Unity” saw former Bank Rakyat chairman Tan Sri Sabbaruddin Chik and former Sabah chief minister Datuk Seri Osu Sukam also attending as speakers, while Malay rights group Perkasa’s president Datuk Ibrahim Ali was present in the crowd.

Although technically expiring in 1990, many of the NEP’s race-based policies continue to be enforced and even expanded.

The discriminatory policy is also a major source of discontent among non-Bumiputera communities, who complain that it deprives them of equal treatment and opportunities.

A year after coming into power in 2009, Najib launched the NEM on March 30, 2010, with an eye on doubling the nation’s per capita income by the year 2020 to an estimated US$15,000 (RM49,500).

The three underlying themes of the NEM were “high income, sustainability and inclusiveness”, as the prime minister stressed on the need to reduce fiscal disparity between the rich and poor without relying on affirmative action policies like those in the NEP.

But critics were quick to argue that Najib’s NEM was merely a watered-down version of the NEP.

On September 14, 2013, Najib announced the new Bumiputera Agenda that will offer the country’s largest community access to over RM30 billion in aid and contracts — an apparent continuation of the very system of NEP-like affirmative action that he had pledged to do away with under the NEM.