Datuk Mustapha Sakmud, the chairman of Parti Keadilan Rakyat's Sabah state leadership council, has made a pointed appeal for the country's political landscape to fundamentally realign around substantive governance rather than the divisive identity categories that have long dominated electoral competition. Speaking in his capacity as Minister in the Prime Minister's Department for Sabah and Sarawak, Mustapha contended that the relentless deployment of racial and religious sentiments by political actors serves primarily to fragment rather than unite the electorate, creating artificial fault lines that obscure the genuine policy differences between competing parties and their varying abilities to deliver tangible improvements to citizens' lives.
The appeal represents a significant ideological positioning within the current Malaysian political environment, particularly given Malaysia's historical susceptibility to communal polarization and the strategic use of identity politics by various factions. Mustapha's argument gains additional weight from his presence at the 2026 PKR National Congress, where the shift from identity-based to performance-based political competition emerged as a central theme in party deliberations. The emphasis on this reorientation suggests that PKR, as a major coalition partner in government, is seeking to establish a new paradigm that could reshape how political parties campaign, govern, and justify their policies to voters across the nation.
In the Sabah context specifically, Mustapha framed racial, religious, and cultural diversity not as a liability inviting competitive exploitation but as an inherent strength that demands inclusive, needs-responsive governance. His argument contains an implicit critique of rival parties that continue to activate communal grievances and tribal loyalties rather than presenting coherent plans for economic development and social provision. He contended that Sabahans have become sufficiently politically mature to reject attempts to pit communities against one another, preferring instead to evaluate leaders and parties on their capacity to address concrete problems such as employment, infrastructure, healthcare access, and living standards.
The philosophical underpinning of Mustapha's position rests on what Sabah PKR terms the "Needs-Based Economy" approach, a framework designed to allocate government resources and design public policy according to demonstrated material requirements rather than demographic categorization. Under this model, assistance and development interventions would be directed toward communities with the greatest actual needs, taking into account income disparities, geographic disadvantages, and measurable development gaps regardless of the ethnic or religious composition of beneficiary populations. This represents a departure from approaches that have traditionally allocated certain benefits or quotas according to predetermined communal entitlements or one-size-fits-all national formulas that fail to account for regional variations.
The practical applications of this principle span multiple critical domains of governance and service delivery. In Sabah's particular circumstances, the approach would carry implications for how fuel subsidies are structured and distributed, how education resources are allocated among schools and regions, how healthcare services are made accessible to populations in both urban and remote areas, how water and electricity reach underserved communities, how transportation infrastructure is prioritized, how rural broadband connectivity is expanded, and how agricultural and development programs are designed for peripheral regions. Each of these sectors presents opportunities to redirect benefits toward those genuinely in need rather than perpetuating systems that may disproportionately advantage certain communities while leaving others underserved.
Mustapha highlighted the review of diesel and petrol quotas as an urgent example of how the Needs-Based Economy framework could be applied to address Sabah and Sarawak's specific circumstances. The Borneo states have historically experienced higher fuel costs and supply challenges relative to peninsular Malaysia, creating genuine economic burdens for transport operators, agricultural producers, and ordinary households. By recalibrating fuel subsidies to reflect the geographic realities and transportation demands of Borneo rather than imposing mechanisms designed for different contexts, policymakers could direct assistance more effectively to those facing the most acute difficulties in accessing and affording essential energy resources.
The MADANI Government's expansion of the Sabah Special Grant from RM600 million to RM1.5 billion serves as concrete evidence, in Mustapha's assessment, that policy-based approaches can materially improve resource flows to disadvantaged regions without requiring invocation of communal preferences. This substantial increase—representing a 150 percent boost in dedicated funding—demonstrates that a federal government committed to addressing development disparities can do so through straightforward policy decisions that treat need as the primary criterion. Such an expansion, if strategically deployed across education, healthcare, infrastructure, and poverty reduction programs, could narrow the gap between Sabah's development indicators and those of more developed states without requiring political actors to manipulate racial or religious identities in order to build electoral coalitions.
Crucially, Mustapha's intervention also reasserts the constitutional claim that Sabah retains entitlement to forty percent of net revenue derived by the federal government from the state's natural resources. This demand, rooted in the Malaysia Agreement 1963 (MA63) and the Federal Constitution, positions the Needs-Based Economy framework within a broader struggle over federalism and resource distribution. Rather than framing Sabah's interests through the lens of Bumiputera rights or inter-communal equity, the invocation of MA63 principles appeals to state-level sovereignty and the original constitutional bargain that brought Sabah into Malaysia, potentially creating political space for development-focused arguments that transcend identity categories.
The timing of Mustapha's remarks carries particular significance given the broader trajectory of Malaysian politics. A growing cohort of younger, urban, and better-educated voters has demonstrated increasing impatience with traditional identity-based political messaging, demanding instead that parties articulate clear visions for managing inflation, creating employment, improving public services, and ensuring environmental sustainability. Should the MADANI coalition successfully position itself as the champion of performance-based governance while opposition parties remain invested in communal mobilization, the government could gain substantial electoral advantage by claiming the mantle of modernity and pragmatism.
However, the translation of this philosophical commitment into consistently implemented policy remains the critical test. Identity politics persists because it often serves powerful interests and activates deep psychological attachments that performance-based appeals may struggle to overcome. The real measure of whether Malaysian politics can genuinely pivot toward the framework that Mustapha advocates will lie not in rhetorical statements but in budget allocations, implementation patterns, and whether resources actually flow toward need rather than demographic categories. Should Sabah and other states demonstrate that this approach can deliver measurable improvements in living standards across all communities, the model could prove sufficiently compelling to reshape electoral incentives nationwide.
