KUALA LUMPUR, Dec 12 — Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim’s choice of DAP leader Nga Kor Ming to head the Ministry of Housing and Local Government has drawn quick but predictable claims this was to revive local council elections and pave the way for “Chinese political control”.
Barely 24 hours after Anwar’s 28-member Cabinet was announced, PAS mouthpiece Harakah daily published an article that repeated the usual trope about a purported DAP agenda to control the country’s major cities and towns through city councils.
The author of the article, Fairuz Hafiiz Othman, who is the secretary of the party’s Perak chapter, suggested Anwar’s selection of Nga was not a coincidence and that the DAP had likely lobbied for the post as part of “a big mission to politically dominate the major urban areas”.
The narrative has long been the basis for the opposition to the “third vote” ever since it was suspended in 1964. What mainly fuelled this concern was the sizable population of ethnic Chinese in major cities and towns. At the time, Malays predominantly resided in the outskirts.
But the fact that this agenda has not taken place in states controlled by Pakatan Harapan — which included DAP — dispelled such claims, argued former Bangi MP Ong Kian Ming.
In Selangor, for example, Ong noted that the distribution of councillors has been reflected the demographics of the district.
“I do not think PAS or Perikatan Nasional can point to any places where the Chinese councillors are over represented. In any case, what is important is not necessarily the race of the council members or the mayor but whether he or she can do the job well,” he told Malay Mail.
“For example, in the Klang Municipal Council (MPKJ), there is a Malay councillor by the name of Lily (under the DAP quota) who takes care of Sungai Chua, which is a 90 per cent Chinese area. The local population have no problems with her as their councillor, she speaks fluent Mandarin.”
Demographic shift
Under the current system, councillors that represent local governments within a state are appointed by the respective governing political parties.
PH and the DAP have controlled Selangor and Penang since 2008 but the city councils in these are evenly represented across ethnicities, even in zones and municipalities that tend to be disproportionately populated by a certain ethnicity, coalition leaders have often pointed out in response to claims that Chinese DAP leaders control these areas.
The Petaling Jaya City Council (MBPJ), for example, a local government overseeing one of the most mixed and densely populated areas in Selangor, has nine Malay councillors and fifteen of minority ethnicities.
These are just councillors that are appointed by the governing coalition that tend to change after a two-year term. Even as PH has ruled Selangor for 14 years, MBPJ’s primary workforce remains predominantly Malays.
Ethnic composition in the cities have also shifted tremendously since the 1960s, with urbanisation data pointing to a continuous influx of Malays in the country’s major cities and towns.
In 2010, Malays formed over half of all urban dwellers nationwide while in Kuala Lumpur, the census that year showed the community made up 45.9 percent of residents, compared to 43.2 percent Chinese, something PH leaders have repeatedly highlighted.
“That was 12 years ago, and demographic trends show Malay numbers are growing against the Chinese,” Setiawangsa MP Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad, a PKR leader supportive of local council elections, had been quoted as saying.
“The notion that the cities are majority non-Malay needs to be corrected. The Malay population is already an urbanized population and most of the large cities in Peninsular Malaysia are Malay plurality if not majority, for example Shah Alam, Bangi and even Kuala Lumpur,” Ong said.
Proponents have long argued that concerns about ethnic representation in city and town councils were misguided because they reject the very system that could empower the population to decentralise and decouple partisan influence on local governance, which has shown to enable corruption.
Azira Aziz, a lawyer and electoral activist, said the ability to elect local councillors independently of the state government would effectively neutralise any influence state governments have over local politics.
The appointment system in place now, she argued, only encourages political patronage. It is not uncommon for local councillors now to be aides to state assemblymen and federal lawmakers, inviting the perception that these were rewards, especially for poor performers.
An election would instead subject non-performing local councillors directly to the wrath of mostly politically neutral residents who can choose to elect candidates based solely on their track record instead of partisan loyalty.
“If anything, it forces transparency and accountability to deliver on campaign promises,” she said.
Third vote benefits PAS and Umno, too
Local elections can also benefit parties that have opposed it, argued Wong Chin Huat, an academic who studies electoral systems. Local elections could open up the opportunity for PN to slowly gain a foothold in the PH and Umno states, even though they do not win state governments.
“If they can have some local leaders elected as councillors, that would help them to sustain and expand their ground,” he suggested.
Still, despite all the murmurings about the prospect of a DAP minister restoring the third vote, the agenda appeared conspicuously absent from PH’s 15th general election manifesto. Ong noted that local council elections will not be a priority under the current “unity government”.
“The issue of local elections is something which DAP has championed in the past and will continue to champion. But it is not in the PH manifesto so it will not be a priority under this new government, regardless of who is the minister for housing and local government... the priority right now would be the economy,” he said.
Wong believes there is a lack of political will from all sides to reinstate local elections, even from within PH itself.
“In simple terms, parties like monopoly and the absence of local elections allow them (if they win state power) to enjoy the captive market and exploit the consumers. This is why Kelantan and Terengganu never want local elections even though there is no way Malays can lose power there,” he said.
“This is also why Penang and Selangor refuse to run mock local elections for voters to decide whom the state governments should appoint as councillors.”
Mock local elections refer to a system where voters can only elect nominees for the state to appoint as local councillors, not local councillors directly
In 2018, the first PH government’s federal territories minister, Khalid Samad, acting on the coalition’s pledge to reinstate local council polls, had proposed that Selangor’s capital, Shah Alam, be a launchpad. The proposal was ironically met with “pushback” by leaders of the Selangor PH administration at the time.
In Penang, the DAP-led government was forced to abandon the idea curtailed by legal hurdles. Reinstating the third vote would require amendments to the Local Government Act 1976 .
