What Sabah Needs Are Leaders Who Can Think, Even Without PhD

Someone recently pointed out that Iran’s senior leadership is, almost without exception, highly educated. Engineers. Jurists. Surgeons. People who spent years being forced to construct an original argument, defend it under pressure, and revise it when the evidence demanded.

It made us wonder. What does Sabah’s look like?

So we checked.

What We Found

We went through every minister in the current Sabah cabinet. Eleven portfolios. We looked for their highest qualification, their field of study, and whether it had anything to do with the ministry they now run.

One match. Out of eleven. ONE!

Jamawi Jaafar holds a Bachelor of Agricultural Science from Universiti Pertanian Malaysia, plus over a decade as an agricultural research officer. He is now the Agriculture and Fisheries Minister. He is the only minister in Sabah’s cabinet whose degree directly corresponds to the portfolio he holds. He is also, not coincidentally, the only minister whose appointment looks like it was made on merit. And it shows too. He is constantly bringing ideas to the ministry, actively kickstarting programmes that would truly benefit Sabah if carried out successfully.

Sadly, the rest of the cabinet tells a different story.

Masidi Manjun is the Finance Minister. He is a qualified barrister, called to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn, London in 1979, with an LLB from the University of London. He has no economics qualification, no finance background, and no public record of formal training in fiscal management. He manages Sabah’s state budget.

Joachim Gunsalam is the Deputy Chief Minister responsible for Works and Utilities. He is a physician, MBBS from Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, with a postgraduate qualification in Tropical Health. He has no engineering qualification. He oversees Sabah’s infrastructure.

James Ratib is the Minister for Education, Science and Technology. He holds a Master’s degree in Business Management from Asia e University. He is in charge of Sabah’s education system and its science and technology agenda.

Mohd Arifin Mohd Arif holds a PhD in Islamic Studies from Universiti Putra Malaysia, with his undergraduate degree from Al-Azhar University in Cairo. His field is deep, his background, religious. He is in charge of Local Government and Housing.

Jafry Arifin is a qualified lawyer, admitted as an Advocate and Solicitor in 1990. He is the Minister for Tourism, Culture and Environment.

Two ministers, Rubin Balang and Nizam Titingan, have no publicly available qualification on record anywhere. Not on Wikipedia, not on the official Sabah Government website, not in any party profile or news archive we could find.

Before anyone says this is uniquely Sabahan, we also checked Sarawak and Selangor. All eleven ministers in each cabinet. Every qualification verified.

The results were not what we expected.

Selangor, Malaysia’s richest, best-governed state, has a PhD in Aeronautics from Imperial College London sitting in its cabinet. Dr. Mohammad Fahmi Ngah spent years as a Senior Quantitative Analyst at British Energy and a Senior Technology Consultant at the UK Defence Research Agency. He is heading Islamic Affairs. His Science, Technology and Innovation portfolio is a genuine match. His Islamic Affairs portfolio is the most spectacular qualification mismatch in all three states combined because he is catastrophically over-qualified for the wrong thing. Make it make sense.

Additionally, Selangor has Anfaal Saari, who holds a Master of Science in Particle Physics from Universiti Malaya and a Bachelor of Science in Physics from the University of Auckland. She graduated magna cum laude from Northwood University in the United States. She is heading Women Empowerment, Family Welfare, and the Care Economy.

Sarawak’s Education Minister is a lawyer. Its Agriculture Minister is a physician. Its Transport Minister studied social science.

Across all three states combined: 33 ministers. Five clear portfolio-qualification matches.

The problem is not Sabah specifically. The problem is how Malaysia appoints people to govern. But there are two distinct versions of this problem and Sabah has the worse one.

Selangor’s mismatches are aeronautical engineers and particle physicists in the wrong seats. The talent is there. The allocation is wrong. That is a fixable political problem.

Sabah’s mismatches include a lawyer heading Finance, a doctor heading infrastructure, and two ministers for whom no qualification exists anywhere on the public record. That is a talent pipeline and disclosure problem, not a misallocation problem. And it is the harder one to fix.

The Civil Servant Trap

What happens when you put a minister without domain knowledge in charge of anything?

Simple.

The career civil servant becomes the real decision-maker. Not because the civil servant is competent (though some arguably are) but because the minister has no independent framework to evaluate what he is being told. He cannot push back. He does not know what questions to ask. So he nods, signs, and takes credit for outcomes he did not shape and blame for disasters he did not understand until they had already happened.

This is not theoretical. We have seen it. With our own eyes.

A few years ago, then Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak made a speech in Beaufort in which he announced that Sabah now had a four-lane highway all the way to the town. The audience looked at each other. The road did not exist. Najib did not know that. He thought the funds allocated had been spent on what they were supposed to be spent on. Nobody in his briefing chain told him otherwise. Nobody in the room corrected him. The local politicians applauded.

That is what happens when the person at the top cannot interrogate his own briefing. The civil servant who prepared the talking points was not lying, exactly. He was managing upward. He was telling the principal what the principal wanted to hear, or what was easiest to say, or what kept the department’s budget intact. The principal had no tools to detect the gap between the claim and reality.

Multiply that across every ministry, every year, every budget cycle, and you have a description of how Sabah has been governed since 1963.

The civil servant is not necessarily the villain in this story. He is a rational actor in a broken system. He is not out trying to destroy Sabah. His goal is to survive until his pension, keep his department funded, avoid embarrassing his superiors, and go home at five. Those incentives align only with their own self-preservation but brings nothing to Sabah’s fate.

This is why we believe that the only corrective is a minister who can read a briefing paper critically. One who can spot the assumption buried on page twelve that invalidates the recommendation on page two and then turn to the room and say: I am not signing this until someone explains why we are doing it this way instead of that way.

That minister does not need a PhD although a basic Bachelor’s Degree in the correct field of study with his portfolio wouldn’t hurt. But what he needs is the habit of mind that a genuine education is supposed to produce. The ability to think independently, to question received wisdom and when the evidence changes, to update his position.

Because when that habit is absent, the jabatan runs the state. Not the cabinet.

The Credential Has Already Been Gamed

There is a second layer to this.

Malaysia has a well-documented problem with dubious credentials in public life. Honorary doctorates listed as earned doctorates. Degrees from unaccredited institutions. Postgraduate qualifications obtained through programmes of genuinely uncertain rigour.

In our data, we noted that at least one Sabah minister holds a doctorate in a field entirely unrelated to his portfolio — Islamic Studies, heading Local Government and Housing. We are not questioning the degree. It is the appointment we have a problem with.

Even where credentials are real, they are frequently misread as signals of competence in areas they have nothing to do with. A law degree is a strong credential. It produces people who can read closely, argue clearly, and spot logical inconsistencies. But it does not produce people who know how to manage education systems, infrastructure procurement, or environmental policy.

A medical degree is one of the most demanding qualifications in existence. It produces people of exceptional discipline and technical mastery. In their field. A cardiologist heading a state’s works and utilities portfolio is a waste of a cardiologist and a risk to the state’s infrastructure.

An aeronautical PhD from Imperial College London represents some of the finest technical training available anywhere in the world. Putting that person in charge of Islamic Affairs is a waste so complete it almost loops back around to being impressive.

The point being is that the credential, in Malaysian politics, has become a status symbol rather than a functional signal. It says: this person completed something difficult once. It does not say: this person has the knowledge to govern this specific area.

When even that weakened signal cannot be verified, because two ministers in Sabah’s cabinet have no publicly available qualification anywhere, it collapses entirely.

What Self-Reliance Actually Requires

This is where the argument has to go deeper than the data.

Distributism, the political philosophy this publication argues from, holds that genuine freedom requires genuine competence at the level of the individual and the community. You cannot be self-reliant if you are dependent on a system you do not understand and cannot interrogate. You cannot hold power to account if you have no framework for evaluating what power tells you.

This applies to citizens. It applies, with equal force, to ministers.

The conservative tradition that we draw from (not the theatre of conservatism, but the actual intellectual tradition) insists on something that the modern Malaysian political class has systematically abandoned, which is, the idea that authority must be earned, that competence is not optional, and that the purpose of leadership is to serve the people who cannot serve themselves, not to extract from them.

A minister who cannot read his own ministry’s budget is not serving anyone. He is being served. He is the passenger, not the driver. The civil service drives. The GLC chairmen drive. The contractors who know which numbers to put on which form drive. The minister signs.

That arrangement is a very expensive performance of governance, funded by the people it is supposed to protect.

Subsidiarity adds a third dimension. The principle holds that decisions should be made at the lowest level of authority genuinely capable of making them. Power should not sit higher than it needs to. What can be decided at the community level should not migrate to the state. What the state can handle should not be handed to Putrajaya. Applied here: a minister who cannot independently evaluate what he is being told has already violated subsidiarity in practice, regardless of the formal structure on paper. Decision-making has migrated upward, to the civil servant, to the GLC chairman, to the contractor, because the person formally in authority lacks the competence to exercise it. Subsidiarity does not merely describe how power should be distributed. It demands that whoever holds authority at any given level must actually be capable of discharging it. Incompetence at the top is not just a governance failure. It is a structural invitation for power to concentrate precisely where it does not belong.

The Sabah that can govern itself, negotiate from strength with Putrajaya, manage its own resources, and build functional institutions, requires leadership that actually understands what it is leading.

Name, Degree, Institution, Year

We are making two specific demands.

The first is immediate and requires no legislation. The Sabah government should publish the educational qualifications of every cabinet minister on the official government website. Name, degree, institution, year of graduation. Updated every time the cabinet changes. This is not an invasion of privacy. These are public officials spending public money. The public is entitled to know what they studied.

Selangor has zero ministers with unlisted qualifications. Every single EXCO member’s background is on the public record. Sarawak lists the Premier’s qualifications on the official government website as a matter of course. There is no principled reason Sabah cannot do the same, except the absence of political will.

The second demand is harder and will take longer.

Sabah needs a public conversation about whether portfolio assignment should have any relationship to what a minister actually knows. This must be done openly, without a government committee or a workshop facilitated by a consultant.

One clear match out of eleven is not a coincidence. It is a policy outcome that reflects a system in which ministries are allocated according to political coalition arithmetic, ethnic balance, seniority, and loyalty. Competence does not feature in the calculation.

But despair not. That system can be changed. Other jurisdictions have changed it. It requires political leadership willing to appoint people who know things, even when those people are inconvenient, insufficiently loyal, or insufficiently connected.

We are not holding our breath. But we are writing it down.

Because the first step to changing a system is naming exactly what it is doing.