In the July 19 issue of The Star, Dr Mahathir Mohamad was reported to have said that his greatest failure in his 20 years as prime minister was his inability to change the mindset of the Malays. As is his usual practice in recent times, he blamed the Malays themselves for being lazy and for not changing their culture by working hard.

Dr Mahathir has to realise that if the Malays have such a negative mindset, it is a mindset that has been created and cultivated by the misguided, even brain-dead, policies of the government over the past three decades. Instead of helping the Malays to be self-reliant and confident these policies have reduced the Malays to near total dependency on government handouts and subsidies. These are policies that have undermined their self-respect and have saddled them with serious psychological problems.

Just read the daily newspapers with all the rape cases, drug abuse and HIV/Aids cases and you will witness the suffering of the Malay population.

So here we have a prime minister still waxing lyrical and wringing his hands over his failure to solve a problem created by bone-headed policies of which he is one of the principal designers and architects.