PETALING JAYA, Sept 11 — Many Malays have been driven out of Malaysia’s main cities into the rural interiors because their laziness made them uncompetitive, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad said today.

The former prime minister said the country’s ethnic majority lacks good values, ethics and were not hardworking enough, which he said has caused them to trail behind the other races economically.

“Like Alor Setar (Kedah), now there are no more Malays there when it was them that raised the city. This is because the Malays are poor and they have no money so they sell their land.

“So what happens is the Malays now stay outside the city,” Dr Mahathir said at the launching of a book by Anas Zubedy entitled “Wahai Melayu, Allah tidak akan tolong kamu jika kamu tidak tolong diri sendiri”.

[Translation: O’Malays, Allah will not help you if you do not help yourselves]

Dr Mahathir, who served as prime minister for 22 years and is regarded as the “father of  modernisation”, admitted that he may have failed to transform the country’s ethnic majority to be hardworking.

He said despite all the government had done to help them, the Malays still expect things to come easy and refuse to adopt working cultures of more successful races like those in Japan, the nation integral to the Mahathir administration’s “Look East” policy.

“I have tried for 22 years to help the Malays, maybe I have failed although some may say that I did achieve some success.

“Values dictate if one race should succeed or not… like the Japanese, they are ashamed if they fail. That is why they are afraid to fail… but the Malays, they lack shame,” he said.

Dr Mahathir said the Malays are also bankrupt of honesty.

He claimed of first-hand experience in the matter when his bakery company, The Loaf, tried in the past to sack several managers for stealing money from the restaurants.

“My bakery was meant to help the Malays… give them jobs… but what they did was sapu (swept or stole) my money. That is the problem with the Malays. They don’t have honesty,” he said.

Dr Mahathir is a staunch defender of race-based affirmative action policies as prescribed by the New Economic Policy, an economic model mooted in 1971 to close the socio-economic gap between the largely-urban Chinese and the rural Malays as well as other indigenous Bumiputera.

Ironically, however, the former prime minister has admitted in the past that the programme has made the Malays more complacent while noting that the system had been abused to enrich only a few elites who were close to the ruling party.

But the former prime minister has continued to defend the policy, saying it was still needed to help the Malays compete and bridge the income disparity among the races.