Affirmative Action in Malaysia and South Africa

Preference for Parity

Hwok-Aun Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351626224
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Malaysia and South Africa implement the most extensive affirmative action programmes worldwide. This book explores why and how to effect preferential treatment which has been utilized in the pursuit of inter-ethnic parity, specifically in higher education, high-level occupations, enterprise development and wealth ownership. Through methodical and critical analyses of data on education, workforce and population, the book evaluates the primary objectives of increasing majority representation in education, employment, enterprise and ownership.

The book also critically considers questions of the attainments and limitations of ethnic preferential treatment in reducing disparity, the challenges of developing capability and reducing dependency and the scope for policy reforms.

1 Preference for parity

Purposes, contexts and instruments of affirmative action

Malaysia and South Africa maintain the largest affirmative action (AA) regimes worldwide. Colonial and apartheid rule passed on systemic disadvantages and structural inequalities, manifested in severe group disparities in upper socio-economic strata. Specifically, the under-representation of Bumiputeras in Malaysia and blacks in South Africa in higher education, high-level occupations, enterprise development, and wealth and property ownership have compelled state action to promote the entry and participation of these groups. The magnitude of socio-economic disadvantage of the majority group, coupled with political power, gave rise to AA regimes that are deep-seated and wide-ranging. Race preferential programs are institutionalized and intensively pursued in Malaysia and South Africa, with change and revision over time.

Alongside correcting historical circumstances, AA also rests on its positive capacity in the present, through promoting more equitable representation, fostering cross-racial interaction and diversity in prominent positions and decision-making roles and raising the esteem of groups previously absent in these strata. Nonetheless, given the finitude of the opportunities being distributed, preference granted to one group inevitably attenuates, to varying extents, the amount available to others. Ultimately, the project of AA must manage contending interests.

Countries the world over practice affirmative action of some form. While there is no universal template, the discernible fundamental thrust is to increase participation of designated population groups in areas where they are under-represented. Warikoo and Utaukwa’s (2019) cross-country synthesis of AA in higher education across 20 countries includes Malaysia and South Africa with a cluster of countries for whom post-colonial (or other transition) nation-building conditions catalyzed a specific goal of “national unity,” distinguished from other clusters in which social mobilization and inequality alleviation are more salient conditions and objectives.

The spheres and extents of intervention vary across countries, but in view of the problem at hand, groups tend to be under-represented in upper socio-economic strata, where barriers to entry prevail: higher education, high-level occupations, enterprise and wealth ownership. About one quarter of all countries, across all the continents, employ AA to promote equitable group representation in higher education (Jenkins and Moses 2014). In some countries, affirmative action promotes political representation. In most instances the beneficiary groups, especially where designated by race or ethnicity, are in the minority. Affirmative action based on gender, promoting women’s advancement, reaches out to half the population. A smaller group of countries promote the advancement of a majority group, and within this exceptional crowd, Malaysia and South Africa stand out further for these striking semblances: upper middle-income economies, sizable and urbanized populations, established universities and fairly advanced industrial and financial sectors.

Affirmative action in Malaysia and South Africa is driven by immense socio-political pressures, undergirded by constitutional authorization, bolstered by the imperative of redressing wide and persistent racial disparities and broadened by the range of educational and economic opportunity available for distribution. By today’s count, the Bumiputera in Malaysia comprise the politically predominant Malays and other indigenous groups, constituting 67% of the population, while the “black” category in South Africa, conventionally referring to Africans, Coloureds and Indians, make up 92% of the country’s citizens (Table 1.1). Malaysia registered Gross National Income per capita of $10,700 in 2016, while South Africa touched $7,300, and their urban populations constituted 75% and 65% of national populations, respectively. These profiles contrast with Namibia and Fiji, two other countries noted for majority-favouring affirmative action, where GNI per capita is less than US$6,000, the urban population below 55%.

This book investigates the foundations, policy instruments and outcomes of affirmative action regimes in these two countries. I adopt the term regime to denote the vast, diverse and inter-related web of race-preferential programs under the AA rubric. This inquiry – encompassing the full range of policy sectors and programs – is motivated by the breadth of the regimes and some gaps in the literature. For all the commonalities that cause Malaysia and South Africa to be frequently mentioned together in the context of AA, there is surprisingly little research that systematically considers the policy’s precise basis, purpose and design across multiple sectors of intervention. Rigorous and coherent cross-country comparisons are even scarcer.

In Malaysia, AA is often equated with the New Economic Policy (NEP), despite the incongruence of the latter being an all-encompassing development vision with AA as one of its mainstays. The poverty alleviation pillar of the NEP is, in turn, frequently conflated with the affirmative action pillar. Thus, much of the literature, even while applying the term affirmative action, deals with broader problems of socio-economic development and income inequality, rather than focusing on the specific interventions to allocate Bumiputera opportunity through race-preferential treatment.

Table 1.1 Malaysia and South Africa: Population, demography and national income

Population, total and percentage urban (2016)
Malaysia		South Africa
31.2 million, 75.4% urban		55.9 million, 65.3% urban
Ethnic composition (percent of total population)
Malaysia (2012^1)		South Africa (2017)
Bumiputera	67.4	Black	92.1
Malay	54.8	African	80.8
Non-Malay	12.9	Coloured	8.8
Chinese	24.1	Indian	2.5
Indian	7.2	White	8.0
Other	0.9
Gross National Income per capita (2016)^2
Malaysia		South Africa
US$10,727		US$7,294

Sources: Malaysia: Department of Statistics (2013b); South Africa: Population Quick Info (http://pqi.stats.gov.my), Statistics South Africa, Mid-year Population Estimates 2017 (www.statssa.gov.za/publications/P0302/P03022017.pdf); World Bank (http://data.worldbank.org.).

Notes

1 Most recently available with Bumiputera disaggrated to Malay and non-Malay.

2 Constant 2010 US$.

In South Africa, extensive research and publication on income inequality, employment equity and black economic empowerment (BEE) are germane to affirmative action but, similar to the literature on Malaysia, often deal with secondary outcomes of the policy or study each sector in isolation from the others. Redress in higher education, employment equity in labour markets and BEE in enterprise development, while threaded together by common policy objectives and instruments, are rarely viewed as a large, interwoven policy tapestry. Even terminologies vary across the different policy spheres – transformation, redress, affirmative action, empowerment – but all essentially refer to the same objective of increasing black representation.

The ongoing, worldwide ferment around inequality of opportunity, capability and prosperity, and persistence of such inequalities delineated by race, ethnicity and gender, affirm the timeliness of this study. The fertile state of AA research speaks to the subject’s currency. Affirmative action also recurs in the media and public discourses; the highly prominent and influential New York Times and The Economist have on occasion shone the spotlight on South Africa and Malaysia.¹ Midway between academia and journalism, Brown and Langer’s (2015) Foreign Affairs article provided a concise survey and synthesis of affirmative action spanning a few countries, including Malaysia and South Africa.

Cross-country comparative studies have been in a season of flourish, with numerous compilations of essays on different countries and an assortment of affirmative action subjects.

Edited volumes with chapters on Malaysia and South Africa are most pertinent to this book, notably Brown, Stewart and Langer (2012), Gomez and Premdas (2013) and Dupper and Sankaran (2014). Other countries in these works include Brazil, India, Nigeria, Fiji, the United States, France, Mexico, Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka and Israel. Besides geographic diversity of these country cases, the literature also differs widely in topic, academic discipline, concept and methodology. These studies and reports approach AA from numerous angles: legal and constitutional underpinnings, political representation, social relations, economic opportunity and outcome, upward mobility, or a combination of these subject areas. Some volumes focus on one aspect of affirmative action, notably higher education (Jenkins and Moses 2014) and employment equity (Jain, Sloane and Horwitz 2003). South Africa features in both these publications, and Malaysia appears in the latter. Affirmative action has also warranted inclusion as a public policy aspect of employment practices in the International Labour Organisation’s reports on workplace equality (ILO 2003, 2007), within which Malaysia and South Africa appear.

Somewhat more germane to this book, various two-country comparative studies have delved deeper into policy contents and outcomes, utilizing the opportunity presented by the narrower geographic scope to construct and apply a common framework across both cases. Weisskopf’s (2004) analysis of the United States and India is particularly helpful as a conceptual and methodological reference, for the ways he assembles interdisciplinary tools and integrates a cost-benefit framework for evaluating affirmative action in higher education – encompassing various direct and indirect policy objectives and outcomes. Featherman, Hall and Krislov (2010), comparing the United States and South Africa, collate a rich array of essays focused on the direct policy consequences in higher education.

While some attention was fixed on Malaysia from South Africa during the mid-1990s, to inform the transition from apartheid to democracy, the two have scarcely been studied comparatively. This book recognizes research gaps in the underpinnings, operations, outcomes and implications of affirmative action in Malaysia and South Africa. My enquiry aims to contribute insight on the specific institutional makeup and policy instruments of affirmative action in both countries, which bear remarkable semblances and differences, and empirical findings of policy outcomes across all sectors of intervention – higher education, high-level employment, enterprise development and ownership. Malaysia and South Africa are on contrasting trajectories in some spheres, particularly in higher education and employment, but they are drawing closer in the area of enterprise development.

This book will address five questions:

• 1 What is affirmative action, and why do it?
• 2 How did affirmative action come about?
• 3 How is affirmative action implemented?
• 4 To what extent has affirmative action achieved its goals? To what extent has it fallen short?
• 5 Where does affirmative action go from here?

The following chapters probe these questions, elaborating on the main points summarized here.

1 What is affirmative action, and why do it?

Part 1, comprising Chapters 2 and 3, covers theory and history. Chapter 2 launches the study by laying conceptual foundations, setting out the meaning and scope of affirmative action. I draw on literature particularly relevant and helpful to this inquiry, fundamentally rooted in a specific problem and a consequent set of policy instruments addressing the problem. Identifying and framing the particular problems and policies is instrumental for specifying the directly relevant policy outcomes to be empirically evaluated.

Affirmative action stems from the principal problem of a disadvantaged group’s under-representation in esteemed and influential positions. The case for preferential interventions arises where the under-representation of a population group in the major policy sectors – higher education, high-level employment, management and enterprise, and wealth and property ownership – derives from past discrimination and continuing disadvantage and is compounded by barriers to entry – for instance, entry grades, professional qualifications, work experience, networks and connections. It is socially undesirable and politically unsustainable for a group, whether identified by race, ethnicity, religion, gender or other category, to be persistently absent or minimally present in these strata.² Moreover, lack of diversity and inter-group interaction arguably erodes decision-making bodies’ credibility and national integrity.

Under affirmative action, varying forms of preferential selection and special measures may arise, but their operation and reach go beyond anti-discrimination and equal opportunity laws, particularly where socio-economic circumstances and political pressures call for these disparities to be redressed more speedily and robustly. In principal, the policy is also justified as a transitory solution that becomes less needed as it progresses. The imperative of redressing these forms of inequality is concomitant with the necessity of implementing the policy productively and cumulatively. Ultimately, the goal is to broadly imbue beneficiaries with capability, competitiveness and confidence, such that preferential treatment, particularly in overt forms, becomes redundant. Like any policy, affirmative action presents potentialities and perils, consequences intended and unintended.

This academic exercise is necessarily inter-disciplinary, in line with the multiple dimensions of affirmative action. I consider the legal cons...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Lists of figures
• Lists of tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Lists of abbreviations and terms
• 1 Preference for parity: purposes, contexts and instruments of affirmative action
• Part 1 Theoretical and historical underpinnings
• Part 2 Affirmative action in practice : quotas, codes and preferences
• Part 3 Policy achievements and reforms: progress, shortfalls and prospects
• Bibliography
• Index