The Cariocas and YTL, a Malay Reserve Land and the Malay resolve

YTL Power shows the way ...

File pic of Rio´s Ipenama beach

In Rio de Janeiro, where I have been since the weekend to catch some World Cup football, the poor don´t live in apartments by Copacabana, Leblon or Botafogo; they have squalors for that tucked far enough from the bronze tanned, thonged bodies splayed on the those sunny beaches of Rio. And the poor here, sadly but not unexpectedly, are the Cariocas or the native inhibitants of Rio (or, if you like, heir Bumiputeras). Similarly, the Bumis in KL don.´t reside in Francis Yeoh´s Bukit Bintang, amigos, they tuck themselves away in Kampung Baru and the squalors in the city´s periphery. 

The Cariocas did not remind me of  billionaire Francis Yeoh´s faux pas on crony capitalism; the Malaysians I had met on the way here did. I don´t think the son of Masterbuilders taikor Yeoh Tiong Lay realizes how deep he´s cut: even those who did not have an opinion about him were now critical towards him and whatever good he might have done. It will take a long time before he can shake off people´s feeling that he was deliberately being provocative, that it was really just another attempt to test the Malaysian status quo and the Malay-Bumi resolve, no different from what some of those holier-than-thou politicians have been doing. 

Read with a great sense of foreboding Big Dog´s latest posting Violating the Malay Constitution on the Malay Reserve land grab in Selangor. According to the A-G, Malay reserve land in Ampar Tenang, Sepang and Sungai Lang, Sabak Bernam were occupied and worked on by non-Malays. They opened food stalls, car workshops and constructed buildings on the Malay reserve land ... 

Land issues again, and so soon after the controversy over land sale in Johor to foreigners! Here in Brazil, where their Bumiputeras make up less than 1 per cent of the population, about 13 per cent of land is reserved for them as Teras Indigenas. And even here the demarcation is being provoked and challenged!

 The land grab in Selangor has nothing to do with Francis Yeoh, of course, but it reminds me of the on-going attempts to test the status quo that has defined the relationship between the Bumis and the non-Bumis. The latest piece by The Unspinners on the angry protests by teachers has all to do with Francis and the billion-ringgit online education project that was given to him by the government in what seemed to be a competitive bidding and therefore should have nothing to do with crony capitalism.  

p.s. Heard from some journalists back home that the Sultan of Johor is rethinking his partnership with Francis Yeoh in a controversial billion ringgit power project presented recently on a silver platter via negotiated tender to them by the Energy Commission, I doubt it´s true and even if it is I doubt it will ease the Rakyat´s minds by much or for long ...