Category: Politics & government

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Politics & government

[3001] The tension between popularity and values in political parties

The recently concluded PKR party elections and its ongoing repercussions have attracted a lot of criticisms.

One thread of such criticisms that I find interesting is the allegation that newer party cohorts are not guided by the original ideals of the party, which I would think was progressive politics (or at least center of left in the traditional sense before the Overton window was blown and opened wide). With PKR’s rhetoric now appearing to sway to the right, I feel the criticism has some truth in it.

The criticism goes further that by stating that most of the newer members are attracted to the party because of power (and the potential wealth it brings) more than anything else, leaving reformasi as an empty slogan.

There is some empirics to back that sentiment. Since 2018 when the party first tasted federal power, its membership has grown by approximately 44% to 1.2 million people (as of March 2025). That growth has turned PKR into the second largest party in Malaysia by the total membership in a very short time. And the sequence of events seems to fit nicely into the criticism: power came first and then a surge of membership followed.

Trivia: DAP, the party with the most seats in the Dewan Rakyat, has about 0.2 million members only. Meanwhile, Umno is the largest party with about 3 million members by far (although arguably, the figure should be lower given various defections in recent years; for instance, Bersatu in 2023 claimed to have 0.7 million members and it is reasonable to suspect a large portion of that number were former Umno members). Just behind PKR is Pas with approximately 1 million members.

With a surge in membership in such as short time that PKR experienced, it is inevitable the original value would get diluted. Even a perfect cadre system would struggle to process that kind of surge.

Yet, that criticism is only one part of a whole equation. There is a greater tension at play here due to the nature of democracy.

In a democratic framework, any political party with aspiration for power must enjoy popular support. That almost always translates into more membership and this is true for either power-membership or membership-power causality. And political party should want new members either way.

In the case of PKR, if the criticism is on target, then it suggests that the party’s the application vetting process along with its imperfect cadre system, might be at fault. But there is also a dilemma here: how tight does one need the process to be?

Too tight and one might suffer what Umno suffered back in the 2000s where complaints were often made that joining required support from the existing local leadership that was hard to get (because nobody on the inside wanted to share the gravy). Too loose, then one could argue PKR is a case in point where the party’s values get diluted.

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Economics History & heritage Politics & government

[2999] The three shadows of the 2000s and an eulogy for Abdullah Ahmad Badawi

Malaysia has not had many Prime Ministers, despite what it may have felt like during the merry-go-round contest that took place from 2020 until 2022. In this age where the idea of modern state is taken for granted, it is easy to forget that the modern country is young.

Even with a short modern history—modern meaning post-colonial—it is easy to claim that Abdullah Ahmad Badawi is one of those Prime Ministers who history are looking back kindly. Kindly, because when he passed away earlier this week, most have only kind words for him. Some wept. Kindly, because of the subsequent Prime Ministers who had far worse controversies and were utterly divisive.

The contemporary kindness appears incongruent to the intense emotions and harsh condemnations many felt and said no more than twenty years ago. Living through Malaysia of the 2000s, it is difficult to ignore the dramatic loss of popular support his administration underwent. I suspect there is a recency bias at work here for a majority of people. We forget.

Or maybe we forgive and forget because Abdullah was a kind man, and people generally return kindness with kindness.

I further suspect that we forgive because we now understand that many of the things that happened in the 2000s making life difficult for Malaysians was beyond his control. Living in the shadows of the 1990s was not easy for many. And living in the shadows of Mahathir Mohamad was difficult for Abdullah. But I think most importantly, we were all living in the shadow of a rising China, which could only be understood by looking back from the future, which is today.

The rise of China was a competition Malaysia struggled to address back then. The result is obvious. In the 1990s, Malaysia had a far higher per capita GDP relative to China’s. Now, it is about the same with China slightly ahead.

The rapid industrialization of China caused some Malaysian deindustrialization in the 2000s. As a result, Malaysia’s income growth of the 2000s was slower than it was in the 1990s. Already used to rapid growth, the 2000s growth slowdown (as I wrote in The End of the Nineteen-Nineties) felt like an era of unmet expectations. The Abdullah government fell victim to that. The unmet expectations fueled various dissatisfaction that were amplified by a newly popular and evolving technology that was the internet. Everything else—including the strong rise of energy prices that eventually led to the massive subsidy liberalization shock—was a second-order effect caused by China’s rise.

Abdullah cannot be blamed for China’s success. The story of China was a long-coming world-history in the making. He tried his best but the fact is, it was a tough condition for Malaysia that many would-be leaders would struggle to address. That condition was only reversed by the quantitative easing of the late-2000s/early 2010s, yet again beyond Malaysia’s control, however Najib would later like to claim.

We understand this—explicitly by those who keep a close tab on the global economy, and implicit by those who do not—and thus we forgive.

And from what we know, he had forgiven us too. Such was a gentleman.

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Books & printed materials Politics & government Society

[2992] Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message

Those concerned with the world would likely take Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me as an important work about racism in the United States. I could only believe the book’s importance would only rise further as the white identity politics entrenches itself in the western world. Coates there reveals the societal hypocrisy that exists in the United States with regards to racism vis-à-vis his experience as a black person. While the subject of Between the World and Me is grim, the language used by Coates across all its pages is beautiful.

Cover of Ta-Nehisi Coates's The Message.

When The Message came out in October this year, I was quick to pick it up. The controversy surrounding the book made me all the more curious about Coates’s latest work. That controversy involved him equating Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as apartheid. He had visited Israel and Palestine (and a few other places) and the book was published as Israel continue to commit horrendous killing not just in Palestine but also in Lebanon, while proceeding with its illegal land grabbing exercise in the West Bank.

Coates’s latest is beautifully written, no doubt, but equating Israel’s behavior to apartheid is hardly a new groundbreaking point. That message and other criticisms he lobs in Israel’s directions are only controversial because pro-Israel readers (and non-readers) consider any criticism of Israel as racism/antisemitism. To the wider world, there is no controversy but only a nod to Coates signifying the lack of moral authority Israel has in order to make such accusation.

Israel is not the only subject of the book. He speaks of his visit to Senegal to explore the history of slavery in the US and his own roots. It is here I think where the language is at its smoothest, hence my favorite section of the book.

In both parts of the book, the seeds are quite clearly the points on racism discussed earlier in Between the World and Me. Realizing this, I feel The Message is an extension of Between the World and Me. The former is expands the reality perceived by Coates in his earlier work with the wider world in mind.

But the act of expanding older points does not make The Message unimportant. Sometimes, profoundness of points made is not the point itself. Sometimes, the point is the realization of something had to be done. In justifying writing The Message, Coates writes:

…The figure is you, the writer, an idea in hand, notes scribbled on loose-leaf, maybe an early draft of an outline. But to write, to draw that map, to pull us into the wilderness, you cannot merely stand at the edge. You have to walk the land. You have to see the elevation for yourself, the color of the soil. You have to discover the ravine is really a valley and that the stream is in fact a river winding south from a glacier in the mountains. You can’t “logic” your way through it or retreat to your innate genius. A belief in genius is a large part of what plagues us, and I have found that people widely praised for power of their intellect are as likely to illuminate as they are to confound. “Genius” may or may not help a writer whose job is, above all else, to clarify.

And so he traveled and wrote.

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Economics Politics & government

[2991] Malaysia’s 5G network: the search for the second-best solution has gone awry

Malaysia’s 5G policy is rife with unnecessary controversies. We could have a plain vanilla rollout plan but the power that be likes it complicated and here we are now. Perhaps, this is the hallmark of the Pakatan Harapan government: the more complicated it is, the better.

That vanilla rollout plan—very likely the best solution available—was this: auction the 5G spectrum to the highest telco bidders with the sufficient competencies and then let the winners carry out the necessary investment needed to roll out the 5G service. Malaysia has done this before with its 4G technology and that model worked reasonably well.

The ‘best’ here is qualified: it is from the government’s point of view. And the vanilla plan is a simple, transparent and a proven process. It provides the government with billions of additional revenue that Putrajaya needs for various pressing public purposes. While consumers will bear this cost in the form of high telecommunication fees, the market-based approach will allow the government to reallocate resources from high profitability private sector to the public sector (like healthcare, education and/or even defense that are in dire need of funding).

However, the market-based approach ignores a number of concerns that might be valid. Some concerns are redundant infrastructure/investment, slow rural rollout, vertical integration among the telcos, and higher cost to the consumers. Expanding these points briefly:

  • Redundant infrastructure: there is an argument that 5G and overall telco infrastructure are a natural monopoly: it is cheaper (and more efficient) to build a comprehensive infrastructure instead of multiple redundant networks with holes in the coverage (yes, there are cases when competition is inefficient). This argument goes hand-in-hand with economies of scale to be had with one giant infrastructure instead of having multiple networks.
  • Slow rural rollout: telcos had rolled out 4G technology slowly in the past by focusing on urban areas and delaying investment in the countryside. This is understandable because telcos have to get their returns fast and the cities are the gold mines. Investing on the countryside came much later because the returns here lower compared to the cities. I personally find this unconvincing because 5G technology (as far as I understand it… but I am happy to be corrected) is not meant for industrial and commercial uses. 4G should be able to cater to typical consumer usage.
  • Vertical integration: Here, the concern is telcos will enjoy vertical integration (the public is used to the idea of horizontal monopoly, but different kinds of monopoly exist), which is a control over a swath of telco value chain. This kind of control will allow telcos to enjoy much higher pricing/market power (basically, higher profit margin) versus a model without such integration.
  • Higher cost to end-consumers: The auction cost borne by telcos, their redundant investment cost and the effects of vertical integration will be passed to consumers. A telco price war could mitigate some of these problems but after controlling for that and other pricing regulations, telecommunication fees here will likely the highest compared to other models that exist out there.

I have summarized these points (and more) in a table below, taking into account how it affects 3 relevant parties: the government, the telcos and consumers.

Summary of 3 5G models in Malaysia with 3-party evaluation

These concerns are among the top reasons behind the search for the second-best solution in the late 2010s. That second-best solution in the end morphed into the single wholesale network that Digital Nasional Berhad is. Under the SWN setup, there are no auction while infrastructure investment cost are pooled by all (participating) telcos. Meanwhile, the government via DNB will regulate a 5G rollout plan more tightly so that rural locations do not get left behind. In summary, we have a single infrastructure, theoretically faster rural rollout and lower cost to consumers relative to the market-based option. Given this setup, it is appropriate to call this as a consumer welfare-maximizing model (line #2 in the table above).

Not everybody is happy with the best solution (hence, the search for the second-best): consumers and politicians who regularly play the political of living costs do not like it because it is costly. And Pakatan Harapan tends to play the politics of living costs by too much, as I have argued before. That politics affected the government of the day.

And yes, not everybody is happy with the second-best solution: telcos do not like it because they do not get vertical integration—to put it differently, they do not get to control the infrastructure. Instead, they get is a shared infrastructure with the government having a stake in it. All this points to lower profitability relative to the market-based approach.

However, awkwardly, the government is unhappy with the best and the second-best solution (for reasons I will not go into but which highlights the fact that there are more than 3 parties involved). And they have decided to deviate away from the two models. But instead of instituting improvements, the government appears to be taking the worst aspects of the first two models (see line #3 in the table). For the government, they get no auction revenue and weaker control over 5G infrastructure. The only real winners in the deviated model are the telcos since they do not face auction cost, they get full control over their networks and eventually, consumers will have cough out money for all that. This is ironic given how close the politics of living cost is to Pakatan Harapan.

Another point behind the deviation is the undermining of the second-best approach. The current policy adopted by the government effectively is dismantling the SWN and encouraging telcos to do individual and redundant networks. Because of the way the SWN/DNB works, telcos can pull out of it and join the second network. There are even talks for the third network and it is not hard to imagine almost telcos will have their own network if things go as it is. The fragmentation will present a challenge to profitability (or even viability) of the SWN model: individual telcos will only invest in profitable (largely urban) areas while DNB will be forced to invest in non-profitable (largely rural) locations, which will guarantee the failure of the SWN model.

The logical end to the current policy is as outlined in the line #3 in the table: the negative effects of market-based approach but without its benefits for the government and consumers, together with the negative effects of the second-best solution without its benefits for the government and consumers. To reiterate, the winners will be the telcos.

Winners and losers of the current Malaysia 5G policy.

Looking back, the search for the second-best approach was unwise, especially when the best approach was simple, transparent and a proven successful process. Opening the door to the next best solution has now led us to the worst of solutions. That search has now gone awry, leaving a complicated inefficient set of telecommunication policies.

Categories
Economics Politics & government Society

[2989] Eroding our commons will erode our togetherness

The Malaysian government faces tight fiscal space and the runway to keep going on as we do now is not too long or wide.

The population is still young but it will not be so much longer. This suggests growing needs for healthcare services. In the meantime, education is somewhat underfunded judging by less-than-favorable learning outcomes, compounded or caused by pandemic disruption. Defense is underfunded at a time when the world is becoming a more dangerous place; previous wasteful spending on this front does not help. Climate change requires new kinds of public infrastructure investment. Petroleum revenue is highly like to go down permanently due to rising provincialism, while an aging society means income and consumption tax revenue will struggle to rise in the next 10-20 year period. This has yet to take into account pension liability that the government faces in the same period, which is also underfunded. And, a lot of Malaysians do not have enough savings and in their old age, they will depend on public services more.

The list goes on and on to tell us that under business-as-usual, public spending requirement is rising while there is every reason to suspect that the pace of government revenue growth will not match the former.

The current government understands this and there are efforts to move away from the current business-as-usual scenario. Diesel subsidies has been partly removed (but not in Sabah and Sarawak). There are plans to abolish or at least lower petrol subsidies but that has not happened yet. Recently, the Health Ministry announced it would expand its full-paying patient scheme.[1] This is largely in line with a high-level suggestion made last year that public healthcare should be more targeted to relief fiscal pressures caused by the public health services.

And even more recently, the Prime Minister said education subsidies enjoyed by the rich is to be cut.[2] It is unclear what the actual policy is but that is for us to find out soon when the government tables its 2025 Budget later this month.

But as the government seeks to improve its fiscal conditions, it is crucial to remind Putrajaya that not all fiscal consolidation actions are of equal measures. While fiscal pressures are important and must be addressed urgently, it is not the only things that matter to this country. When it comes to cut or rationalization of public service, it is good to take a step back and reassess what we would lose in return for what we would gain not just in the short Parliament terms, but also in the long-term. After all, most of us save the unfortunate ones, live beyond the 5-year parliament term.

What we would lose from reduced access to public education and health services (and other similar services provided by the government) is the commons. It is the space where we Malaysians theoretically—really, actually for many people—come together regardless of our origins in terms of geography, class, gender, ethnicity, etc. That togetherness allows for the creation of shared lived experience or even shared identity. In an age where technology and quirks of history are leading us to live in our little bubbles, it is our public service that attempts to connect these bubbles into a larger common.

Without these commons, we Malaysians will lose connection to each other, losing whatever left of our shared values and shared identity. Erosion of these commons necessarily lead to the erosion of our togetherness.

I do not think these commons should be eroded by concerns over fiscal pressures, especially when these pressures could be alleviated through other more effective means. Instead of applying the knives to public education and public healthcare systems, other policies could be jettisoned first, like outdated incentives and reliefs provided to private healthcare service providers or private insurance, or outdated subsidies for electric vehicles. And of course, cutting petrol subsidies would go a long way too (although with crude oil prices are low these days, one wonders how long it would go).

And really, Malaysians are able to pay much more taxes. But we refuse to do so.

Our refusal points to another problem: our reluctance to make short-term sacrifices to ensure larger long-term gains and sustainability. It seems that we rather avoid the short-term pain and instead lose something valuable in the future.

Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reservedHafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reservedHafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved

[1] — Health Minister Dzulkefly Ahmad is standing by the government’s proposal to expand private wings at public hospitals as part of a hybrid model termed “Rakan KKM” (Health Ministry Friends). [Health minister defends private wings at public hospitals plan. Malaysiakini. September 24 2024]

[2] — Menjelang pembentangan Belanjawan 2025 tidak lama lagi, Anwar Ibrahim menghantar ‘isyarat’ yang menunjukkan kerajaan sedang meneliti pengagihan subsidi pendidikan kepada rakyat negara ini. Berucap di Putrajaya hari ini, perdana menteri berkata, kerajaan mahu memastikan subsidi sebegitu disalurkan kepada golongan yang benar-benar layak saja.[Golongan kaya mungkin tak lagi dapat subsidi pendidikan. Malaysiakini. Accessed March 31 2024]