The Hawker As An Elemental Capitalist
M. Bakri Musa
www.bakrimusa.com
Consider the simple enterprise of a roadside
hawker selling fried bananas, the most elemental business activity. Every Malay
villager feels he is competent to undertake that venture as it requires minimal
capital, financial and otherwise.
Yet
to succeed at this most basic level of enterprise would still require rudiments
of financial, human, and social capital. Meaning, to succeed these would-be hawkers
must have some training and familiarization with the business. Yet the
government seems to think that giving them cheap loans would be enough. Thus,
they are given money and then left floundering when their enterprises fail, as
surely they would.
Imagine
if those would-be hawkers had been given some elementary training before giving out those loans. To start
with, I would give them cooking classes and teach them elementary health and
safety practices as well as sound rudimentary business techniques like simple
bookkeeping. I would explore with them the effects of the choice of banana,
oil, flour and even cooking temperature on the taste and flavor of their final
product. There is a definite difference in taste between fried pisang raja (king
banana) versus nangka (jackfruit variety), enough to justify a premium
price for the former. Similarly, the type of flour used, whether from wheat,
rice, or tapioca would also influence the texture and flavor.
There
is no limit to enhancing your product line and thus its market value by
tinkering with the ingredients and other variables. Consider the version of
fried bananas served in fancy Western restaurants–bananas flambé–where the
fruit is covered in syrup instead of flour and then drizzled with alcohol and
served in flames. It sells for around US$12.00 per serving. You could offer a
non-alcoholic substitute for Muslim customers. Imagine the value added to your
final product and the consequent enhancement of your revenue with such
modifications.
Beyond
the preparation and recipe, I would also teach these would-be hawkers personal
hygiene and general cleanliness, and the impact these practices would have on their
customers. Frame them as a public health issue, and if that does not convince
those hawkers, then as a religious imperative or better yet, a marketing tool.
Sick customers do not return! I would have these hawkers invest in a clean
apron and cap to cover their hair, as well as wear gloves when handling food
products, just like the executive chefs at fancy restaurants. Again, those
would be good marketing and advertising tools! Look at the hawkers in the Japanese
supermarkets in KL as well as in Japan.
Among
the crucial elements to the success of any business are inventory control and
cash-flow management. Thus, I would teach these would-be hawkers cost-saving
strategies like buying nonperishable items in bulk to get volume discounts. That
would require some financial outlay, and that would be the right instance to
introduce credit loans. An alternative and also more preferable would be for
MARA to use its clout to buy those inventories in bulk to achieve greater
savings and then pass them on to the vendors.
Going
further, we should encourage these hawkers to explore other ways to cut down on
costs. They may not be able to supply their own flour or cooking oil and gas,
but they may have some idle land in the village where they could plant their
own bananas and thus incur considerable savings by not having to buy their
primary ingredient. They could even sell the excess to their fellow hawkers,
producing another revenue source.
MARA
could commission an innovative design of a simple hawker cart on wheels,
complete with a roof and separate holding tanks for clean and waste water. Again
with MARA’s influence, those carts could be constructed cheaply through the
economies of scale.
After
implementing these initiatives, MARA should monitor the progress, tweaking the
program as necessary and assessing the results. The whole process is an ongoing
series of improvements and innovations, as well as learning from experience.
Out
of every 100 of these would-be hawkers and budding entrepreneurs you take in
for the initial training, perhaps only a fraction of them would have the
discipline and motivation to complete it. That would leave only the most hardy
and motivated applicants to receive your business loans. Consider the cost of
training as investment in human capital. Even then, instead of simply handing
these would-be hawkers the cash, I would make the checks out directly to the
suppliers for the purchase of inventories and other goods.
These
would-be hawkers are not used to having substantial amounts of money at their
disposal. Were MARA to simply hand over the cash directly to them, as is the
current practice, the first thing they would do is rush to the nearest Chinese
store on a buying binge of items not even remotely related to their businesses.
Or they would be inundated with relatives each with their own sob stories to
justify their getting a portion of the money.
Yet
that was exactly the standard practice of MARA, and before that, RIDA. No
surprise that those initiatives would fail. When that happened, the officials
invariably blamed the poor hawkers. Worse, they would also be condemned as failures
and forever caricatured as the alleged weakness of their race and culture.
There
are plenty of examples of such blunders, with price tags far exceeding the few
thousand dollars loaned to the hawkers. I remember in my old village there was
the well-connected politician who was given a lucrative timber concession. As
if that bounty was not generous enough, he was also given a hefty loan. The first
thing he did was buy a brand-new Mercedes sedan to drive around town. He did
not think of buying a truck to carry the logs or a tree harvester. Had he
bought a four-wheel-drive Land Rover, it would have made some sense. At least
he could then visit his lumber camps, but a luxury car on a jungle road?
In
Trengganu there was the project back in the 1970s to supply fishermen with
diesel motors and ice makers. Again the same misguided strategy; the officials
simply handed the loan money to those poor fishermen. The first thing the
engine suppliers in town did was to hike up the price of those engines and then
tack on unnecessary service contracts and fees. Had those officials negotiated
a package deal with the supplier, they would have secured substantial discounts
and then passed them on to the fishermen.
In
Kedah there was the gaffe with the mechanization of Malaysia’s “rice bowl.”
Again, the government was generous in providing the major landowners credit to
buy tractors and combines to make their rice production more efficient. That
part of the initiative was sound but as with any mechanization, many unskilled
workers were displaced. As there was no mitigating program to take care of
them, those workers ended up actively sabotaging the initiative and its
principals. The program succeeded only in dividing the community, pitting the
peasants against the landowners. The dynamics of that particular social crisis
is well chronicled in James C. Scott’s Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms
of Peasant Resistance.
The
situation has not changed today except for the obscenely vast sums of money
involved. Most recently there was a mega loan in the hundreds of millions given
to a minister’s husband to start a cattle feed-lot operation. The first thing
he did was buy a top-end Mercedes and two ultra-luxury multimillion-ringgit
condominiums in Singapore. Same dynamics, only the price tags vary. While the
minister’s husband may have an Ivy League PhD, his mentality and mindset was no
different from the simple village entrepreneurs I cited earlier.
Going
back to my pisang goreng hawkers, imagine if only 25 out of the 100
eventually succeeded in having a thriving stall. At first glance that would
appear abysmal, a success rate of only one-in-four. However, on the flip side,
without the initiative, those 25 would have little chance at gainful
employment; with it they are now earning a living and able to feed and clothe
their families, quite apart from providing a service to the community.
The
benefits do not end there. Out of the hardy 25, a few would be sufficiently
bitten by the capitalist bug and be inspired to venture beyond. One would
decide that he could employ a few of his idle cousins to work on his banana
plantations to supply bananas to the other hawkers. Apart from having another
income source, he would also be providing employment for his cousins.
Another
who had been frugal and thus acquired some savings may decide to install a
shade over his stall and add a few tables so he could also serve coffee and tea
, as well as ice cream with his fried bananas, enhancing his product line as it
were. Yet another could discover a winning concoction of a special variety of
banana, a specific brand of cooking oil, and a particular flour to make a pisang
goreng to die for. Building a reputation around his particular product and
keeping his recipe secret, he could start a franchise operation, a pisang
goreng equivalent of Ramly Burger or Starbucks.
As
can be seen the possibilities are endless, even with the humble hawking of pisang
goreng. That simple enterprise has all the elements found in the most
complex corporations: product (and production), marketing (customers), finance,
location, and human resources.
Instead
of pursuing such incremental improvements in each area, we keep going for the
spectacular–with billion-ringgit GLCs, and repeating the same mistakes with
ever-escalating costs. It cannot be that all Malay leaders and policymakers are
corrupt. Many are, but eventually you would get a few honest souls or some
whose conscience would disturb them enough to blow the whistle and put an end
to the nonsense. These Malay leaders cannot all be dumb even though again many
are, for eventually there will be a bright soul or two who would learn from the
mistakes.
Beyond
corruption and incompetence, I suggest that Malays have another and far greater
problem. As a community we have a closed mind, trapped into believing that
those lapses are not acts of incompetence or corruption but noble deeds. It is
this blind loyalty to these incompetent and corrupt leaders that would have us
honor them when they should be jailed, booted out, or at least looked upon with
contempt.
Next: Membajakan Lallang (Fertilizing
the Weeds)
Adapted from the author’s book, Liberating
The Malay Mind, published by ZI Publications, Petaling Jaya, 2013.
The second edition was released in January 2016.
