Malaysia's political landscape needs fundamental restructuring to prioritise policy delivery over identity-based appeals, according to Datuk Mustapha Sakmud, chairman of Parti Keadilan Rakyat's Sabah state leadership council. Speaking in the wake of discussions at the party's 2026 National Congress, Mustapha contended that contemporary political competition should be measured by tangible outcomes rather than by the exploitation of communal sensibilities or religious affiliations.
The Minister in the Prime Minister's Department (Sabah and Sarawak) characterised the prevalence of identity politics as fundamentally corrosive to social cohesion. Narratives that pit one ethnic group against another, or instrumentalise religious differences as fault lines in the body politic, fracture rather than unite the electorate. Such approaches, he argued, distract citizens from evaluating which parties and leaders possess genuine capacity to enhance their material circumstances and address pressing local concerns. This framing represents a significant departure from conventional Malaysian political discourse, which has historically relied heavily on communal mobilisation.
For a state as ethnically and religiously heterogeneous as Sabah, the case for performance-based politics carries particular weight. Rather than viewing diversity as a source of friction to be managed through zero-sum communal competition, Mustapha positioned it as an institutional asset. The mature electorate in Sabah, he suggested, increasingly recognises that the relevant question is not whether a politician or party shares their ethnic or religious background, but whether they can demonstrably solve real problems affecting daily life. This observation reflects broader shifts in voter sophistication across Southeast Asia, where younger and more educated populations are less susceptible to purely identity-driven appeals.
Central to Mustapha's vision is what PKR terms the "Needs-Based Economy" approach, a framework that subordinates communal or categorical criteria to objective assessment of genuine deprivation and geographic disadvantage. Under this model, government transfers, subsidies, and development programmes would be allocated according to measurable indicators of poverty, income levels, and regional development gaps rather than predetermined ethnic quotas or universalised schemes that ignore local variation. This represents a meaningful challenge to Malaysia's established welfare architecture, which has long incorporated explicit communal dimensions.
The practical implications of needs-based allocation would be most acute in Sabah's infrastructure and service sectors. Fuel subsidies, a historically contentious policy domain, could be recalibrated to reflect Borneo's distinctive geographic and economic realities rather than applied uniformly across the peninsula. Rural broadband expansion, water provision, electricity access, healthcare delivery, and road networks would similarly be prioritised according to genuine scarcity and population vulnerability rather than administrative convenience or communal representation formulas. This distinction matters significantly in a state where vast interior regions and offshore islands create genuine logistical challenges that no blanket policy can adequately address.
Mustapha specifically highlighted the fiscal settlement between Sabah and the federal government as a continuing priority requiring parallel attention. The 40 per cent revenue-sharing entitlement, grounded in the Malaysia Agreement 1963, represents a distinct constitutional issue from policy-driven allocation. The recent increase in the Sabah Special Grant from RM600 million to RM1.5 billion under the current administration demonstrates, in his view, how targeted policy intervention can address systemic imbalances. However, he insisted that resolution of the deeper constitutional obligation regarding revenue assignment remains essential to Sabah's long-term development trajectory and federal equity.
The resonance of Mustapha's arguments extends beyond Sabah's specific circumstances. Throughout Malaysia and Southeast Asia more broadly, political systems have begun confronting the limitations and perverse incentives created by identity-based competition. When electoral success depends primarily on mobilising ethnic or religious constituencies, parties face structural incentives to magnify communal grievances and frame political opponents as threats to group interests. This dynamic can become self-reinforcing, gradually shifting discourse toward ever more divisive terrain. Mustapha's intervention suggests growing recognition among mainstream political actors that this pathway leads toward diminishing returns and social polarisation.
The emphasis on performance metrics—economic growth, welfare provision, health outcomes, educational attainment, infrastructure quality—offers measurable benchmarks against which governments can be held accountable. A party claiming to represent a particular community can be evaluated not merely on symbolic gestures or rhetorical alignment, but on whether citizens within that community experience improved living standards, better public services, and expanded economic opportunity. This accountability framework applies equally to all voters regardless of background, creating convergence incentives rather than furthering communal separation.
Yet embedding performance-based politics in Malaysia's institutional terrain presents genuine challenges. Decades of identity-inflected mobilisation have created deeply entrenched organisational structures within parties, expectations among core supporters, and narratives through which many voters interpret political competition. Shifting toward universalised needs-based criteria requires not merely rhetorical repositioning but genuine reconstruction of party platforms, candidate recruitment processes, and internal decision-making mechanisms. It demands that leaders like Mustapha persuade their own party machinery that this transition serves long-term interests.
Moreover, the transition cannot be unilateral. If a major coalition partner or opposition force continues deploying identity-based appeals aggressively, performance-focused competitors risk being outmanoeuvred during election campaigns. Mustapha's calls for systemic change implicitly require coordination among multiple political actors toward a shared commitment to raising the discourse. This represents a collective action problem of considerable magnitude, particularly in a system where electoral competition remains intense and trust between rival camps limited.
The Malaysian context also requires acknowledging that identity and material welfare are not entirely separable. Communities that have historically experienced economic marginalisation may reasonably perceive needs-based policies as threatening previously established protections. Transitioning from categorical to needs-based allocation raises redistribution questions with genuine zero-sum dimensions. These tensions cannot be resolved through rhetoric alone but require substantive engagement with competing claims and legitimate concerns about fairness and equity.
Nevertheless, Mustapha's articulation of an alternative to identity politics addresses real and growing frustration among Malaysian voters of all backgrounds with the quality of political discourse and governance. If implemented with genuine commitment to equity and inclusion, needs-based approaches could break cycles of communal resentment while simultaneously improving policy effectiveness by directing resources where they genuinely make greatest difference. The challenge lies in sustaining political will to pursue such transformation despite powerful forces configured to resist it.
