I have for the past few weeks been a faithful viewer of TV1 in the minutes leading up to the Maghrib azan, which Muslims everywhere will take as the signal to begin stuffing themselves. Watching the station is proving to be an irritating experience.

Several but not all days of the week, we are forced to watch this cartoon programme about a fish named Rainbow who behaves like a teenager. I have nothing against cartoons or fish of any behavioral persuasion, but what's irritating about this programme is that it is American and therefore in some form of English. The only concession to local flavour, if you will, is the fact that it has Malay subtitles.

Isn't this odd? TV1 is meant to be devoted to only Malay-language programmes. How could the broadcasters have allowed this rule to be breached, and in such a prominent viewing slot at that?

My guess is that there were not enough Malay-language shows to fill in the entire broadcasting time of TV1. Even if there were enough shows, they were probably deemed not good enough by the current regime at the Information Ministry.

Why does this irritate me? I'll tell you why. The reason this is irritating is because it has something to do with the current fuss over the Suqiu/GPMS appeals/demands to do away with the distinction between bumiputra and non-bumiputra/the abolishment of Malay rights (tick wherever appropriate). It might seem a long way off from the ringing rhetoric of "hak Melayu" to the mundane fact of my having to watch an American cartoon fish, but bear with me for a moment.

"Hak Melayu" does not mean anything if it's not translated effectively into action. In theory, affirmative action and quotas are meant to bring Malays on par with the Chinese (often euphemistically referred to as "other races" in our daily press), deemed to be economically superior. But these same quotas all too frequently have the unintended consequence of making Malays less competitive. The emphasis on quotas in the allocation of shares and tenders has created a few Malay millionaires of international standing (meaning they are every bit as tacky and wasteful as their counterparts in Jeddah and Monte Carlo), but it has not done much for anyone else.

There's a stark illustration of this in Bakri Musa's book The Malay Dilemma Revisited. Say there are three different bids for a tender to build a hospital. The government will be obliged to accept the one from a Bumiputra company, even if the sum quoted is higher than the other two bids. So a single expensive hospital gets built, and maybe a single Malay millionaire is created. If the government had taken the more competitive bid, there will be enough public money to build not one but two hospitals - one of which can be in a rural area, thus improving the quality of life for all poorer Malays who happen to be living there.

Act of lunacy

It's the same with education. Last year, then education minister Najib Razak said that if it weren't for preferential quotas, Malays would make up only five percent of university intakes instead of the current 60 percent. For GPMS to propose that this quota be raised to 70 percent for public universities and 60 percent for private colleges is an act of lunacy that merely conjures up a scenario of these places being swamped by even dumber Malays. How is that going to help anyone?

Malays are not genetically dumber, but something's obviously wrong with the way these students have been taught. Additionally, racial quotas in education (not only for students but for teachers) can encourage complacency, since they know they don't have to try that hard to get a place. And we wonder why the National University of Singapore always ranks higher than any of our own hallowed institutions in those regional surveys. (Then again, we could just dismiss the surveys as further proof of foreigners-jealous-of-our-success. Which is what we do anyway.)

Poorer Malays are the greatest victim of the "Malay rights" chest-thumping that Umno periodically indulges in to boost its sagging popularity. They are disillusioned by the fact that the rhetoric so rarely brings any tangible benefits to them - and so used to the greed and hypocrisy that are inextricably linked to the rhetoricians - that it's no wonder the absolutist Islamic discourse of PAS seems more appealing: it's far less corrupt, and you will only find out in the afterworld whether you've been conned or not.

This brings us right round to watching TV. There's a quota for TV programmes that heavily favours bumiputra companies. The quota can make the producers really sloppy when it comes to their work, since their shows are almost guaranteed to go on air anyway. But obviously, in this case at least, their shows were not good enough for TV1. Instead of opening up the playing field to other Malaysian (i.e. non-bumiputra) companies, the station opted instead to buy an American cartoon about a teenage fish. The creative potential of our own people was bypassed in favour of a quick solution that also involved a capital outflow to another country. Nice one.

What is the Malay dilemma of today? Long-term quotas that are designed for the short-term political benefit of the present government is like that old adage about giving people fish instead of teaching them how to use a rod and bait. The fish that is given out might seem superficially attractive and even have names like Rainbow, but they're likely to make you ill after a while.