THE statement by PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang blaming the incidences of corruption in Malaysia on non-Muslims and non-Bumiputera has put him under investigation for incitement and abuse of network facilities under section 505(C) of the penal code and section 233 of the Communications and Multimedia Act 1998. As 28 police reports have been filed against Islamist party leader.

When there is an attempt to “test” whether a social system can be manipulated using religion or other forms of identity, it is always important to observe how the system reacts – will it take the bait, or will it “increase the degree of uncertainty” to the manipulators.

This is not the first time PAS is trying to test the manipulability of its captive audience. They had already tried to use the “religion” trump card when they objected to Muslims attending the Bon Odori event.  

Now came the time to press the ethnicity button.

It is unclear whether Hadi has managed to date to produce factual evidence to support his highly provocative statement. In an attempt to defend his explosive remark, PAS central committee member Mohd Zuhdi Marzuki referred to the empirical work by two researchers from the Universiti Sains Malaysia, Christine Siew-Pyng Chong and Suresh Narayanan, titled “The Size and Costs of Bribes in Malaysia: An Analysis Based on Convicted Bribe Givers” and published in the Asian Economics Papers journal in 2017.

For this reason, the study mentioned above deserves justice.

The study used a data set from the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) database, which comprised 449 offenders – bribe givers convicted over five years, from 2010 to 2014 (the early period of Najib Razak’s administration). This was the MACC database, formerly known as the Name-and-Shame online database, created in line with one of the goals under Najib’s “Government Transformation Programme” of creating “the region’s most detailed database of corrupt offenders” (p8).

In academic writing, as a part of the research problem statement, researchers always state what will happen if the problem is not given attention – that’s where the study’s significance is derived from.

The authors, in their attempt to draw urgent public attention to the worrying state of corruption in Malaysia, warned that despite the visible attempts to strengthen Malaysia’s resilience against corruption – such as the creation of the MACC by Abdullah Badawi’s administration to replace the Anti-Corruption Agency, and placing the fight on corruption as one of the national key results areas in Najib’s Government Transformation Programme – public perception was that corruption in Malaysia had instead increased, as transpired in Transparency international Malaysia’s 2014 Corruption Barometer results. At that time, the authors and the public could not have imagined the deplorable state the nation would on day reach.

Nevertheless, the main research question for Chong and Suresh was to identify the factors likely to influence the size of bribes which, as the authors rightfully noted, has a direct correlation with the negative impact on the nation (in the form of a greater waste of corporate resources, lost government revenues or greater misallocation of economic resources).

More importantly, in the highest standards of academic writing, the authors also clearly stated the study’s limitations related to the data set’s specifics and warned that any findings drawn from this data set cannot be and should not be used to make any inferences to the entire population of Malaysia.

The reason for the above is this data sample was not drawn randomly from Malaysia’s population. Therefore, there could be some systematic (non-random) processes involved in making certain individuals more likely to be included in/excluded from it – inherent selection bias. Specifically, the data set did not include several groups: those who did not engage in bribery, those who did but were not caught, and those who did and were caught but were not convicted. All of this makes the generalisation of findings to the Malaysian population impossible.

However, the data set served the research objective of the scientists to test their hypothesis and still make a meaningful contribution to the body of scientific knowledge on corruption which the scientific community knows how to interpret correctly and build on.

And what patterns did the authors discover in the data set?

The distribution of sociodemographic characteristics in the data set revealed that the sample was dominated by males (94%), non-Malays (88%), those aged between 30 and 49 year (65%), employed (94%) from Peninsular Malaysia (78%) and the bribes were mainly given to officials in federal and state authorities (91%).

In their identity politics-laden rhetoric, PAS leaders conveniently cherry-picked 88% of bribe givers being non-Malays while omitting the fact that in the same data set, 94% of bribe takers were mainly Malays working in the federal and state authorities.

Most notably, the PAS politicians have entirely ignored the researchers’ explicit reminder that these figures cannot be generalised to the population of Malaysia and, at best, are merely suggestive.

However, we must, again and again, remember the data set limitations, and this should prompt other researchers to re-test this link between corruption and identity in a nation-representative sample.

Interestingly, the researchers also observed that a larger proportion of bribes (68%) in the data set did not exceed RM1,000, with most cases (51%) involving sums below RM400.

This brings us back to the inherent selection bias issue highlighted above. After all, the so-called “Name-and-Shame” online database by MACC, which came into existence under Najib’s Government Transformation Programme, might merely play the role of political optics when the people involved in petty corruption cases have been publicly shamed while “bigger fishes”, we now know, have been plundering the nation’s resources without “rasa malu”.

PAS never ceases to amaze with its abilituy to stretch facts with “alternative truth”, when the truth of the research with the relevant caveats or limitation of the study was well defined by the researchers. The Prophet Muhammad said “verily every action depends on intention” (Sahih Bukhari). PAS, being the best merchant traders of Islam, certainly manifests sinister intention of accentuating the identity politics of race and religion, that is clearly anathema to the teachings of Islam. – September 14, 2022.

* Dr Rais Hussin is president and CEO of Emir Research.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.