This article first appeared in Capital, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on July 17, 2017 - July 23, 2017

IT’s easy to feel low about living in Malaysia these days. Prices are going up but salaries aren’t really keeping pace. If you’re a Gen Y living in the Klang Valley (hey, me too!), then you would know that traffic jams are getting longer too.

But don’t fret. Kelly Clarkson said what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right? And say what you will about Malaysia, it is a land of tremendous opportunities.

So much so that we who live in this land have become such an enterprising and resourceful lot when it comes to making money. Just look at the billionaires and multi-millionaires we have. Some of them were migrants who started with absolutely nothing!

That resourcefulness has not changed over the decades, mind you. Maybe it’s the chlorine overdose changing our brains — we are about 90% water after all.

It’s just that most of us don’t realise this innate resourcefulness and only a few can tap into it these days, like the guys who came up with all these money games.

There is no other way to explain how the temporary validation cards for illegal foreign workers, which were supposed to be free, somehow cost some migrant workers thousands of ringgit, according to news reports.

Or how bauxite stockpiles in Pahang have not reduced despite a mining ban for the past 18 months. Our bauxite exports to China were climbing as at May despite a complete freeze on mining — truly a magical and enterprising circumvention of both mathematics and logic.

Hey, maybe that’s why the government calls its entrepreneurship innovation centre MaGIC, for Malaysian Global Innovation and Creativity Centre. Who knows.

Of course, what takes the cake (not for free, mind you) these days is the magical story of a very well-connected Malaysian who managed to become a billionaire by his early thirties through sheer financial creativity, rewarded by a luxurious lifestyle on super-sized yachts, and the company of the most glamorous stars.

It is a success story straight out of a fairy tale. Of course, the said success came at the expense of his 30 million-odd fellow Malaysians, but that’s unfortunate and there was no wrongdoing.

In hindsight, the ancients probably knew this aspect of our land when they decided to call the Malay Peninsula the Golden Chersonese, which means Golden Peninsula in ancient Greek. The only caveat is you have to know where to find these opportunities.

Also, you have to know what to do with them, legally or otherwise. But that’s another topic for another day.

So it is no surprise why entrepreneurship is such a big thing for the government these days. Of course, more entrepreneurs equals less people to absorb into the civil service, but, hey, unintended benefits are nice, right?

Anyways, harnessing this enterprising bone of ours is a good way to fight back against our emptier pockets these days. And of course it’s also the patriotic thing to do. The Inland Revenue Board is looking to tax ill-gotten gains as well, so even if you choose to go down that road, you’re still contributing to the country.

(Disclaimer: I am not condoning that you look for ill-gotten gains. Illegal activities are illegal even if IRB taxes your gains.)

As for me, I already have a rock-solid, profit-making plan. If Permodalan Nasional Bhd was willing to pay a whopping RM419,006 for just 25 plate numbers that begin with “PNB” for corporate branding purposes, surely other big-name corporates (and maybe some small ones) wouldn’t want to miss out.

So if I can get to these plates before the big ones do, I can pretty much on-sell the plates and make enough money to quit my job by next year.

Now, would the Employees Provident Fund prefer “EPF” or “KWSP” plates for branding purposes? Never mind, I’ll buy both and mark them up by, I don’t know, 90% or something like that.

Now, I wonder if the Transport Department can let me get the plate numbers on credit…

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