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Koleksi Khas Digital
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| Abstract : |
| IN the same week that Malaysian tankers, including vessels operated by Petronas and MISC Bhd, were stranded in the Strait of Hormuz, the national oil firm found itself at the centre of a separate controversy at home.
Reports that Malaysia exported diesel to the Philippines — even as domestic prices were rising — provoked public anger, political accusations and 47 investigation papers for misinformation, before the facts finally emerged.
The shipment had nothing to do with Petronas or Malaysia. Rather, it belonged to a Singaporean trading company and was transiting through Pengerang.
Two issues occurring in the same week, with one geopolitical and the other manufactured.
In the first case, Petronas appeared as a vulnerable national asset, with its tankers stranded in a contested waterway and waiting for safe passage home.
In the second, it appeared as a convenient political instrument, accused and acquitted within a single news cycle, its name deployed before the facts were established.
The juxtaposition is not accidental. It is a precise illustration of the position Petronas occupies in Malaysian life: simultaneously indispensable and expendable, depending on the needs of the argument.
A longer version of this contest has been running since 2018.
Petronas has been deployed alternately as a political instrument and a political target, most visibly in the protracted dispute between Putrajaya and Sarawak over petroleum revenues and the terms of the Petroleum Development Act. The argument is framed as a debate about federalism, historical agreements and the rights of the component states of Malaysia.
But before any of these arguments proceed further, it is worth pausing on a prior question — not who should control Petronas but what Malaysia would be like if Petronas had not existed at all.
The answer is more clarifying than any legal brief.
MORE THAN JUST A COMPANY
In 1974, Malaysia made a choice. That choice was made by a prime minister who would not live to see its full consequence.
Tun Abdul Razak died in January 1976, less than two years after signing the Petroleum Development Act into being. What he left behind was not a company; it was a decision about the kind of state Malaysia would become.
He could have left hydrocarbon development to proceed as it had before, through joint ventures operated by international majors, with the state as a financial participant but not an institutional builder. Had that path been taken, the trajectory of each of the three territories sitting on significant hydrocarbon reserves — Malaya, Sarawak and Sabah — would not be difficult to trace.
The reference point is Brunei. Today, Brunei is among the most prized assets in Shell's global portfolio. Brunei Shell Petro-leum, a joint venture in which Shell provides the operational and technical leadership, is the largest private sector employer in the country.
The public sector employs roughly half the national workforce. The oil and gas industry accounts for over 60 per cent of the country's gross domestic product.
However, while its economy is wealthy, the institutional depth did not follow at the same pace.
Without Petronas, Brunei, Malaya, Sarawak and Sabah combined would have become the most consequential prize in the global energy industry.
Not poor, not ungoverned but rather dependent, in the most fundamental sense, on an entity whose accountability is to its shareholders, not the people.
The regional record makes this achievement more legible, and also more precarious in retrospect.
Indonesia's Pertamina predated Petronas. Today, half a century later, it remains a contested prize between political administrations rather than an independent institutional actor.
Last year, a crude oil trading and fuel adulteration scandal resulted in state losses estimated at over US$12 billion.
As a result, prosecution was launched in the opening weeks of a new presidency while the president's loyalists took over its administration.
Independent analysts have described the move not as an institutional reform but rather as a transfer of control. The oil sector's interests that transcend individual administrations have never been dislodged; they merely changed patrons.
PetroVietnam, which explicitly modelled itself after Petronas, has also followed a recognisable path.
It became known internationally not for its commercial achievements but for the simultaneous trial of 22 executives, including the first politburo member to face prosecution in decades.
Thailand's PTT Pcl comes closest to Petronas in commercial terms, being also a listed, profitable and internationally active state enterprise. But PTT is a commercial vehicle and not the institutional spine of a national project.
INSTITUTION THAT SHAPED MALAYSIA
What the decision of 1974 made possible was not merely wealth. It was the conversion of a finite resource into something that does not deplete with the oil. The Malaysian state was built, campus by campus, highway by highway, institution by institution, on the fiscal transfer that Petronas made possible across five decades.
A generation of Malaysians educated at the world's best universities on Petronas scholarships returned not simply to work for the company but to seed every corner of Malaysia's professional, corporate and institutional landscape.
The generations of Malaysians it has trained and deployed across the national economy are themselves the most visible proof of what the 1974 decision produced. The 50,000 employees who remain today are the continuing custodians of that proof.
The negotiating position Malaysia holds today in its relationships with international energy majors, the capacity to enter those rooms as a counterparty rather than a supplicant, is a form of sovereignty that was purchased by the 1974 decision and cannot be purchased any other way.
Brunei received dividends. Malaysia received institutions.
Petronas did not merely enrich Malaysia. It was one of the central instruments that made Malaysia possible institutionally.
It converted hydrocarbon wealth into the fiscal and organisational architecture that bound three territories into a single national project.
The question is not whether Petronas represents Malayan authority over the other component states. The question is whether Malaysia would exist in any recognisable form without it.
Without Petronas, the question confronting Malaysians today would not be who controls the national oil firm but rather who controls the Shell concession. And the answer would be "not any Malaysian, in Putrajaya, in Kuching or anywhere else".
Of all the institutions that have shaped the Malaysian project, few have done so more consequentially.
The present dispute with Sarawak is a contest between politicians over the control of resources. That is not a criticism. Resource contests are a normal feature of federal systems, and the underlying questions about revenue-sharing and state rights deserve serious engagement on their own terms.
Indeed, the centralisation of resource authority that made Petronas possible also makes this contest inevitable. The present argument is not an aberration. It is the structural consequence of a decision that concentrated authority in order to build national capacity, and must now reckon with how that capacity is shared.
The contest is being conducted over an inheritance that neither side fully acknowledges. The entity at the centre of this argument is the reason both sides have anything worth arguing about.
That inheritance does not place Petronas beyond criticism. It places a higher burden on how that criticism is conducted.
Scrutiny without proportion is not analysis. It is noise. |
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