Since I don't have a single sen of equity ownership in any company (except for some meagre savings in ASB and Tabung Haji) maybe I can convince the non-Malays including those intellectuals like Tony Pua and Liong Tiong Lai who seem to be too keen to get rid of the NEP.

As a result of a statement by Deputy Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak that he was willing to slowly do away with provisions in the NEP like the 30 percent bumiputera equity, Liong quickly jumped in to say that this is the only way to enhance Malaysia's competitiveness.

If Pua could say that PAS Youth chief Salahuddin Ayub was missing the woods from the trees for opposing such an idea (abolishing the NEP), I would say the same thing of Pua and Liong too. It is hypocrisy of the highest order.

I am still wondering what has Malay equity got to do with competitiveness. At worst, the decorative Malay chairman of a Chinese-owned company could help out in their dealings with the government or in their sales campaign in Islamic countries.

Pua and Liong surely know that the failure of the 30 percent bumi equity target as envisaged by the NEP was mainly due to the policy’s corrupt and inept implementation and outright abuse of power.

For instance, for every IPO (initial public offering), there is already a long list of people and groups who must have their allocations, at par price, either given for free or technically free because they are financed by bank loans which are repaid in no time.

The 30 percent target would have been achieved long time ago if these IPO allocations were handed out to bumiputera investment institutions and not all those RM2 companies set up by political cronies purely to benefit from IPO allocations.

If properly carried out under the Islamic concept, we would have achieved not only the bumiputera equity target but also true national unity in the corporate world while at the same time churning out a huge pool of competent bumiputera corporate men.

Also in the process, this would also cleanse the non-Malay companies of all their unethical business practices.

Under the Islamic concept, an investor, be it an individual, family, group or institution, will become a partner in any business ventures and will partake both in the management and the day-to-day operation of the company.

This, the non-Malay owners of companies may find quite unpalatable because they don't want the Malays to know the ‘inside secrets’ of how they run a company like keeping two books, etc.

Since all the above was either not done or done wrongly both the non-Malay companies and the Malay equity partners (who are more parasites than anything else) have suffered. The non-Malays suffered from interference while the Malays have betrayed the NEP.

At the end of the day, if Nissan installed Brazilian Carlos Ghosn to turn the company around by abolishing a lot of Japanese methods of doing business like protecting inept suppliers, I don't see why non-Malay owned Malay companies, too, could do the same and allow good honest Malay corporate men and women into their boardrooms.