Earlier this month, I read that fifteen families held capital assets worth about 76% of Malaysia’s GDP (The separation of ownership and control in East Asian Corporations, Claessens/Djankov/Lang, Journal of Financial Economics 58). It piqued my interest because it doesn’t take an expert view of our history to realise how power in this country is concentrated in the hands of a few. In our relatively brief history as a democratic nation, our political leadership grows increasingly dynastic, dependent on the personality cults of its leaders and paid for by complicated networks of cronies. Many of these links begin right there in our leadership’s names.

Our first Prime Minister was the son of the 25th Sultan of Kedah. His next two successors represented prominent families and married aristocrats. (In fact, they were brothers-in-law and the fathers of our current [sixth] Prime Minister and Defence Minister.)

This habit of Malay power being interwoven with ties to local aristocracy goes deep and wide, whether by blood or by marriage. Tunku Abdul Rahman, the Father of Malaysia, was actually something of a maverick in this regard, as his three marriages to non-Malay women and single marriage to the daughter of the Malay Yang di-Pertua Negeri (Governor) of Penang encapsulates a rare openness for our leaders. That said, our current Prime Minister’s first wife was a Kelantanese princess, and the aforementioned Defence Minister is married to a princess of Pahang. These are just samples of our highest leadership. Malaysia’s nine historical monarchies means that the number of princes embedded in our power structure would fill a book by itself.

Apart from royalty, the sheer size of Malaysia’s aristocratic families lends itself to the proliferation of Tengkus, Wans and Niks peppered among the boards of major firms and organisational rosters of political bodies. In an Asian society where your name and who you know are still important factors in one’s ability to start and run an enterprise, these connections have real effects on who controls our economy. It is important to note that as with any very large family, there will be richer and poorer members. Family ties alone do not guarantee equal distribution of wealth or influence. What matters is the effect of this influence at all, on business as well as policy.

Tengku? Tunku? Tun? As with monarchies everywhere, the list of royal and court titles is long and complex. People far more knowledgeable than me have crowd-sourced a detailed page of titles and what they mean over on Wikipedia. How many of these titles do you recognise in the names of our country’s prominent people — from the government, opposition and business sector?

Now, being a member of the aristocracy is not a prerequisite to hold public office (unless that is hereditary royal office). Regardless of their heritage, our leaders had to be elected into place. So inasmuch as Malaysia is a functioning democracy, this aspect does more or less function.

Nor does the lack of a title mean that politicians are opposed to keeping it in the family. Second generation, post-independence politicians run right across party lines, as do their spouses and children.

We know that the British’s policies of educating local elite to fill the Malayan civil service got many of our older leaders (and thus their progeny) a head start. Apart from being privately wealthy, powerful, well-educated parents are more likely to ensure their children are well educated, and powerful parents are more likely to ensure their children inherit that power. This extends to both old money and new. The economic boom of the 1980s and 90s heralded the rise of a strident upper-middle class, whose children benefited from the foreign university degrees, private tutoring and leg up in their career their wealth could buy them. That same boom was a large contributing factor in Malaysia’s growing wealth disparity, in turn a significant outlier behind the country’s increasing social unrest as inflation raises the cost of living across the board.

To the country’s credit, as the generations trickle down, a growing cohort of local leaders are normal human beings like the rest of us. But this is still overlaid with a dense network of patronage. For example, one of the more popular anecdotes is that beginning a business in Malaysia requires Malay partners on paper to access closed markets and affirmative action privileges to succeed — regardless of who the ultimate owner is. Which brings us back to those fifteen families I mentioned at the start of this piece.

Although social mobilisation has increased, the public’s voice against endemic corruption has neither effected meaningful policy changes nor the enforcement to combat it. This does not appear to be for lack of reporting or social awareness. The general understanding is that “everyone knows” but “no one wants to rock the boat”. Yet, even taking into account the strong culture of self-censorship and very real legal blocks against free speech, social apathy alone cannot be the entire reason for the lack of cohesive social response.

The clue lies in the generation of post-economic boomers I mentioned earlier, who experience the compound effect of racially-biased affirmative action policies and rising wealth, thereby gaining improved opportunities to live and learn abroad. Leonard J. Schoppa’s excellent Race for the Exits: The Unravelling of Japan’s System of Social Protection is a study of how Japan’s system of “convoy capitalism” has failed to stop both nationally important industries from moving their businesses abroad and failed to address the needs of Japanese women for improved career mobility as well as an opportunity to have children. The latter issue in particular contributes to Japan’s rapidly aging population problem, with not enough young people to replace it. Mr. Schoppa’s work tries to address the question of why neither the big corporations who shifted abroad nor the women stifled by a deeply patriarchal culture mobilised in force to have their demands heard.

In a nutshell, the economic progress that precipitated Japan’s global-oriented firms and increasingly educated, career-minded women offered a limited exit valve for those who could afford to leave the system. Faced with rising labour, energy and supply prices, the corporations big enough to do so found it easier to not rock the boat and gradually make foreign direct investments elsewhere. This took away some of the biggest corporate voices for change. The companies who could not afford to move were not influential enough to affect policy adjustments on their own.

Women given a choice of leaving their hard won careers to start a family — as Japanese culture and policy still expects mothers and wives to do virtually all the care-giving— would either leave the workforce entirely (depriving Japan of young, working-age adults) or stay on the career-track and never marry or have children. This naturally took away the incentive these women would have had to mobilise for gender-neutral parental leave, improved job protection and outright cultural changes that are more in line with the modern family. The result is Japan’s below-replacement birth rate and looming labour shortage (both from poor inclusion of women in the workforce and replacement working-age adults to fill the gap).

Connecting this to the Malaysian context, at least since the late 80s, the country has faced a gnawing “brain drain” on its workforce. Young, foreign-educated Malaysians who find better work and living opportunities abroad have increasingly chosen to move away from the country entirely. At least in the beginning, there was an impression that most of the people who left were non-Malays, in response to pro-Malay affirmative action policies that hindered career mobility, as well as the government’s discriminatory promotion of Malay culture and conservative Islamist thinking over other viewpoints.

When the government began realising that there were not enough specialised professionals returning home to fill vital industries (medicine being one of the most acutely shortchanged sectors), the Malaysian administration set up TalentCorp, an agency tasked with wooing back young professionals in the diaspora back home. All the tax credits and lifestyle allowances in the world, however, do not erase the stigma of racial discrimination. During the boom years, this was less of a problem, as increased wealth opportunities spread far enough to create sufficient class mobility for most Malaysians (and fuel the limited exit of some).

You’ll note that I said “class” and not “social” mobility. One of the inverse effects of the boom years was the rampant cronyism that preyed on excess money in the system, and the growth of nested corporate groups with no easily discernible owner. These two points are not necessarily exclusive of each other, as the recent implosion of 1MDB (and its spiderweb of connected shell firms) imply.

The boom years also provided a convenient veil for consecutive Malaysian administrations, beginning with Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad’s two decades in office, to cripple the independence of our judiciary, consolidate state control over the media, suppress political diversity and silence dissenters in civil society. In this increasingly oppressive intellectual atmosphere, the government courted conservative, pro-Malay, Islamist elements, further alienating the parts of the population most likely to exit given the chance — well-educated, middle-class working adults with globally-oriented perspectives.

At least by TalentCorp’s own admission, this exit is also increasingly transcending racial lines, which suggests that poisonous local politics, strident Islamism and affirmative action is also affecting Bumiputeras. When we consider that affirmative action policies have historically been pro-Malay, we run into the uncomfortable idea that the indigenous peoples of Malaysia would be even more disenfranchised, as the ruling class is formed of specifically Malay elites.

Obviously, not all Malays agree with affirmative action, embrace Islamist policy or support the traditional monarchy with its family ties in our democratic institutions, anymore than all non-Malays wish to exit. The real issue is the oppressive local atmosphere against diversity, whether this is greater freedom to worship, to marry or freedom of expression. None of this is helped by the entrenched bloodlines in our politics, and certainly not by how opaque those spheres of influence can be within the labyrinthine corporate groups overseeing our economy. We need more transparency across our political and economic spectrum before we can begin to mend the scars of racial dissonance.

Out of the myriad personal reasons Malaysians choose to migrate abroad, a larger picture also emerges of problems so deeply embedded into the nation’s psyche, it would require decades to fix and significant regime change. These include relatively philosophical issues, like rebuilding trust among our diverse communities, but are primarily the sum of smaller matters in government and laws. For example, dismantling the Islamist influence on our educational curriculum is part of a larger overhaul needed to promote a holistic history of Malaysia. This would be half the effort in divorcing said curriculum from pro-Malay alignment. Of the two, Islamism is the newer element, co-opted by Malay ethnocentrists as the presiding character of Malay culture.

How Malay nationalists have co-opted Islamist thinking into Malay culture is an essay in itself, and one I won’t go into detail here. For a good primer on the subject, I suggest the CPI white paper, “The Islamisation of Malaysia: Religious nationalism in the service of ethnonationalism.” Part 1 of this paper is an overview of Islamist creep into Malaysian policy. Part 2, the part relevant to what I’ve said above, is an overview of how Islamism has altered our public education syllabus, particular secondary school History, and rendered it so pro-Malay as to be virtually xenophobic.

Creating a narrative where the start of all Malay identity relevant to modern Malaysians is the arrival of Islam in the 14th century does a great disservice to a far older, far richer, and far more diverse history of our country. It’s like trying to begin the history of the United States with European settlement and skipping the thousands of years of South American civilisation, not to mention the indigenous peoples of North America.

Malay nationalists who take on the mantle of Islam to give themselves relevancy are analogous to White nationalists in the US who use the mantle of Christianity for the same purposes. Both groups espouse conservative, isolationist ideology that depend on keeping their supporters closed off and deaf from wider world issues.

As a religious faith, Islam has been a significant influence on regional culture since the 15th century. The vested power of regional sultans as their states’ religious heads has historically gone unchallenged, even when these traditional sultanates have had to cede power to popular government. Malaysia’s sultans are not exempt in this. Each of our Sultans is still the head of Muslim affairs in his state. Our status as a constitutional monarchy symbolically holds up our King as central to social order (in an explicitly Muslim Malay kingdom). Malay culture in this sense should encompass language, adat (customs) and traditions —both Islamic-influenced and otherwise.

By shifting the focus onto a pan-Islamic identity, Malay nationalists have also shifted the focus of Islamic leadership, and thereby Islamic diversity, within Malaysia. This shifts the focus of Malay cultural leadership from the monarchy and into the hands of individuals, including those in the ruling government, who over the past three decades have spared no expense in ensuring Islamism’s narrow, puritanical culture becomes the official Islam.

What makes this startling is that the same Malay aristocracy who have embedded themselves in our elected administration are often the same people who have been expanding this influence, all the while benefiting from their positions among the Malay elite. This snake-eating-its-own-tail formula should not be able to survive, but it has. The same Malay elite (and their cronies) who have kept their tendrils in Malaysia’s engines are in practice the same people borrowing Islamism’s wrapping paper to convince their subjects how much more relevant they are than before.

In practice, Malaysia’s moneyed politics cripples our country’s ability to develop an independent national identity and a truly popular government. It mires our economy in corporations so complex, they become too big to fail. And as the wheels turn, it creates a ruling class so widely connected, corruption touches everybody.

The second part of my essay will get into more detail about how I think pan-Islamic identity, vis-à-vis Islamic revivalism, is supplanting the Malay nationalism that embraced it to create a no less divisive form of politics. Overlaid on the deep corruption within our political culture, the moral smokescreen of being “more Islamic” is cynical and destructive to not just the various Islams representing Malaysia, but towards our entire multi-ethnic community.