6th February, Kota Kinabalu: The Home Ministry’s response that Sabah has no power to issue its own identity cards is a lazy and evasive reply that avoids the real issue, and repeats the same insincere posture taken by previous administrations.
The real issue is not who issues MyKad, but who determines Sabahan status.
Sabah IC has never been proposed as a replacement for the MyKad, nor as a mechanism to grant Malaysian citizenship. Citizenship and national registration remain federal matters, and nothing in the Sabah IC proposal contradicts federal law, the Federal Constitution, or the National Registration Act.
What Sabah IC addresses is a gap that federal law has repeatedly failed to fix — identity abuse that affects Sabah directly.
Project IC demonstrated the grave consequences of collapsing identity, citizenship and local status into one unchecked federal process. That damage has never been fully repaired.
More recently, Malaysians witnessed how foreign footballers were issued Malaysian and Sarawak birth certificates under the FAM scandal, and how religion was wrongly and illegally inserted into MyKads — a practice decisively rejected by the Kota Kinabalu High Court.
In that case, YA Datuk Celestina Stuel Galid held that the indication of “Islam” on the MyKads of an illiterate father and his children was wrongly inserted by registration officers without their knowledge or consent, and that it is fundamentally wrong for authorities to make such unilateral determinations. The Court affirmed that a MyKad is not conclusive proof of identity particulars and is subject to challenge.
These are not isolated errors. They point to systemic weaknesses in identity governance.
A person can be Malaysian without being Sabahan. Citizenship granted by the Federal Government does not automatically confer Sabahan status under the Malaysia Agreement 1963 and Sabah’s constitutional safeguards.
Sabah IC is about verification, the rule of law, and ensuring that no Sabahans ever again become victims of identity abuse. It is not about politics, and not about defying federal authority.
To dismiss Sabah’s concerns by simply saying “the State has no power” is neither responsible nor sincere. Sabah needs accountability, transparency and action — not denial dressed up as legal technicalities.
Lawyer Yong Yit Jee
Sabah Progressive Party (SAPP)
Supreme Council member cum Vice Youth Chief