Umno Youth held its much-hyped “special convention” on January 3 to decide whether the party should continue its cooperation with Pakatan Harapan in the unity government. At its conclusion, Umno Youth chief Dr Akmal Saleh emerged with a familiar rallying cry: Umno should leave the unity government and revive its relationship with PAS through the Muafakat Nasional (MN) alliance.
“The time has come for the unity of the Malay people.
“This is not about me or my political career – it is about our religion and our dignity. If Umno and PAS can come together, I am confident the Malays will unite behind us.
“The Malays are known for their patience, and our religion teaches us to be patient. But patience has its limits,” he declared.
For context, the immediate trigger for the convention was Puchong MP Yeo Bee Yin’s refusal to apologise for a Facebook post celebrating the Kuala Lumpur High Court’s rejection of Najib Razak’s bid to serve the remainder of his SRC sentence under house arrest. The court ruled that the alleged royal addendum cited by Najib had never been deliberated by the Federal Territories Pardons Board, rendering it invalid.
Akmal’s remarks also came amid renewed calls from PAS leaders, including PAS election director Sanusi Nor, to revive Muafakat Nasional as a platform for Malay-Muslim unity ahead of the next general election. Sanusi argued that Umno–PAS cooperation was vital for political stability, especially at the grassroots level.
Yet for all the drama and rhetoric, I am quite convinced Akmal’s emphasis on “dignity” is precisely why Umno is unlikely to leave the unity government.
Why?
Well for one, I think Akmal call to quit the unity government over one lonesome DAP lawmaker making a Facebook post, over the sentence of a man who is already in prison and found guilty on multiple occasion, is too petty. Even if your heart is set on divorcing your spouse, you should wait for the appropriate occasion to arise, before you manifest your intent. It is one thing to express your desire to divorce your spouse, after they spent a large portion of your joint savings without your consent, but it is a whole other thing to do so, simply because they forgot to buy you dinner on their way back home from work. If you do the former, it is your spouse that will be blamed, not you. The reverse however, is true of you if you do the latter.
More pivotally, I also doubt that Akmal's call for leaving the unity government on the basis of dignity will gain much traction , because the fundamental problem confronting Malays today is not that their dignity or rights are being infringed upon. It is that they do not feel like the race that calls the shots.
Historically, Malays likely did experience genuine indignity and erosion of rights. In the 1940s, the Malayan Union challenged Malay political primacy. In the 1960s, economic dominance by non-Malays created a sense among Malays that they were servants in their own land. Those were real crises of dignity and rights and in both cases, the Malays did genuinely unite to confront their problem of the erosion of their rights and dignity.
But today, that is no longer the case.
The Malays today do not feel that their rights and dignity are under existential threat. Instead, what they suffer from is an erosion of status, or the feeling that despite being the politically dominant group, they do not feel dominant.
In short, the Malays are suffering from a form of political “imposter syndrome”. Officially, they are the boss—but in reality, they do not feel like they are boss.
Why?
Because dominance is not merely about having the numbers or holding positions; it is about recognition. To feel dominant, those deemed to be subordinates must acknowledge your dominance. They must respect you superior status, emulate you, and defer to you. They must accept that the boss decides what is right and wrong, who does what, and who gets what share of the rewards.
That is precisely what many Malays feel is no longer happening.
Instead, other communities openly criticise Malay leadership as flawed or incompetent. They resist emulation rather than aspire to it. They argue back, push back, and increasingly instruct the “boss” on what the boss should do. Sabah and Sarawak go further, openly disputing revenue allocations and asserting their own calculations of what they deserve, rather than leaving distribution to federal discretion.
This is not a crisis of dignity or rights.
It is a crisis of status and dominance.
The tragedy of Malay politics is that its leaders either do not understand this—or are afraid to confront it. So they retreat to the safer and familiar language of “rights” and “dignity”, even though the issues pertaining to rights and dignity were largely settled one or two generations ago.
Why the fear?
Because, subconsciously, the Malay leaders might know an uncomfortable truth: which is that unity does not resolve problems of status. Dominance does.
Unity is a tool to defend survival, dignity or rights when it is under attack. But status is not achieved through cooperation—it is achieved through competition and consolidation of power.
To resolve the issue that afflicts the Malays today, a a Malay leader and his party must rise to assert dominance over all other Malays parties and leader, but to do so, they can't cooperate or unite with the other Malay leaders or parties. Instead, what they should do is compete to eliminate rival Malay leaders and parties, subsume them, and establish a single hegemonic force. Only then would both Malays and non-Malays genuinely accept who the “boss” is.
Ironically, it is the unresolved desire for status and dominance that keeps splitting Malays into rival factions in the first place. Expecting unity without resolving that underlying competition is to repeat the same mistake endlessly while hoping for a different outcome. It is in other words, the very definition of insanity.
And we already know how this story about “uniting the Malays” is going to end —because we have seen it before.
UMNO, PAS, and Bersatu have already attempted Malay unity and cooperation—more than once. Each attempt follows the same predictable cycle. It begins with a sense of grievance: Malays are said to be “disrespected” or “not treated according to their rightful status,” usually because multiracial parties or parties associated with other communities are gaining political ground. This grievance is then framed as a crisis of “Malay dignity,” and unity is prescribed as the cure.
But the moment Malay parties achieve unity, the very grievance that justified it resurfaces—this time from within. Once united, the contest shifts inward. One Malay leader or party seeks to assert authority: deciding what is right and wrong, who leads, who follows, and who receives what share of power and patronage. Inevitably, other Malay leaders and parties begin to feel sidelined, diminished, or subordinated. The language of grievance returns—again invoking “disrespect” and “betrayal,” but now directed at fellow Malay leaders rather than external rivals.
Solidarity then gives way to rivalry. Rivalry escalates into power struggles. Power struggles end in fragmentation. Once fractured, and faced again with the rise of multiracial or non-Malay parties, the same leaders rediscover the rhetoric of loss—of dominance, of status, of dignity—and return to calls for Malay unity.
If emotions run high enough, reunification may occur. Yet because the underlying struggle over dominance is never confronted or resolved, it resurfaces once more, tearing the alliance apart again. And so the cycle repeats—unity, rivalry, fracture, grievance, and renewed calls for unity—indefinitely.
As long as Malay political leaders insist on misdiagnosing the problem as one of dignity or rights, rather than honestly confronting it as a struggle over status and dominance, Malay unity will remain not a solution, but a recurring illusion.
The problems of dominance are not solved through cooperation and unity. They are solved through competition and elimination —until one Malay leadership and party emerges as unquestionably stronger than the rest.
If Akmal and Sanusi truly want to solve the Malay problem, they should actually try to compete with each other, not cooperate with each other. They should try to wrestle with each other, until they either eliminate the other, or subordinate them, so that they can consolidate the Malay leadership into a singular hierarchy, that is capable of exuding genuine dominance.
But they likely don't know how or are incapable of doing it - and so they inevitably resort to charging against the windmills to slay non-existent dragons, rather than confront the actual demons, that lie within their own designs on each other.
When cooperation is attempted in a situation that demands competition, support is lackluster, and betrayal becomes inevitable. The leadership can cry about “dignity” and “disrespect” all they want, but the grassroot will not find their words moving their heart and mind. Allies will also, sooner or later, turn on one another, not because of ideology or principle, but because status can only rise if someone else’s falls.
So relax.
Malay unity will never happen—not because Malays lack sincerity, but because they are trying to solve the wrong problem with the wrong solution.
TheRealNehruism (nehru.sathiamoorthy@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
The User Content (as defined on Newswav Terms of Use) above including the views expressed and media (pictures, videos, citations etc) were submitted & posted by the author. Newswav is solely an aggregation platform that hosts the User Content. If you have any questions about the content, copyright or other issues of the work, please contact creator@newswav.com.
