WHEN Tambunan Assemblyman Datuk Dr Jeffrey Kitingan raised the prospect of renaming Sabah’s Chief Minister as “Premier” and reconsidering the use of “Negeri,” the immediate reaction in some quarters was predictable: that this is mere symbolism, cosmetic at best, yet this instinct among detractors misses the point.
Political orders are not sustained by law alone, rather they are sustained by language and by the titles, symbols, and forms through which authority is expressed and understood.
As Benedict Anderson observed, political communities are, in many respects, “imagined” into existence through shared symbols and narratives. Titles, therefore, are not a simple embellishment or “window dressing”, they are constitutive of how a polity understands itself.
Sabah’s position within Malaysia is not ambiguous in law either, Article 1(2) of the Federal Constitution of Malaysia distinguishes Sabah and Sarawak as the “Borneo States,” a formulation that recognises their separate historical and political origins.
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