Across Sabah, the streets have turned black. What started as hometown outrage in Sipitang became hundreds gathering in Kota Kinabalu. Before long, tens of thousands were marching and rallying across Sabah for a young girl whose life was cut short. Zara Qairina Mahathir, aged just 13, was found unconscious in a drain near her school dormitory. The next day, she was gone.
There was no post-mortem, just a hasty burial which has left the nation stunned and suspicious. The response from the authorities? Slow, secretive, and evasive. This is standard operating procedure for the Malaysian police, who – much like their counterparts under other capitalist regimes – are infamous for their corruption, brutality, and disregard for public safety. From deaths in custody so rampant the Malaysian Bar itself condemned them, to Sabah’s own drug bribery scandals, the police are a force that protects power – not the people. In Zara’s case, only after a storm of public anger and unrest was her body exhumed for further investigation. This alone proves what every working person knows: without mass action, there is no justice.
Zara’s death was not an isolated act of cruelty. It has cast a harsh light on the long, mounting crisis of bullying in Malaysia’s schools and dormitories, where neglect and abuse have become daily realities. Across Labuan, Sabah, and Brunei, the protests have spread with a single message at their core: enough is enough.
A Rotten System
Zara’s death is not an isolated tragedy, and the public’s outrage is not merely the manifestation of one community’s grief. They are the direct products of a system that treats working-class lives as expendable and less-than. The violence that claimed Zara’s life is mirrored in the everyday bullying crisis across Malaysia, a crisis created by the same policies of underfunding and neglect that treat working-class children, especially in Sabah, as expendable. A system where the safety of children comes second to avoiding scandals, where schools and dormitories are underfunded and neglected while the elite enrich themselves.
Zara’s case has acted as a spark that lit a fuse across Sabah, one laid by years of decay – becoming a rallying cry against the daily reality of corruption at the top and hardship at the bottom. The crisis of Malaysian capitalism has hit Sabah especially hard, and the people’s outrage is reaching new heights. Already impoverished, in the past year they have seen a water crisis leave taps running dry, and a mining licence corruption scandal implicate both Sabah assemblymen and businessmen – a transparent demonstration yet again that the government serves only capitalism.
And while the capitalists enrich themselves and oppress the people, Sabah remains one of the poorest areas of Malaysia – it’s transport infrastructure crumbling, unemployment sky-high, with Sabahans making up 29% of Malaysia’s unemployment in 2024, and the local economy heavily dependent on plundering nature. This underdevelopment has been deliberate, with local capitalists and the federal government treating much of East Malaysia as an internal colony to exploit. The system that failed to protect and provide for Zara and others like her, is the same one that fails to provide clean water, decent jobs, and affordable living to millions.
It is no surprise that Malaysians are in the streets in their thousands, shouting “Hidup Rakyat!” – “Long live the people!” – a rallying cry used for years in the streets, and heard again at recent Sabah vigils.
Confronting Power
This eruption of grief and anger follows close on the heels of another confrontation with the government. Suara Mahasiswa UMS, a student-led anti-corruption movement at Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS), has been taking to the streets since May 2025 on a campaign against water injustice, corruption, and political betrayal, calling for UMS to take legal action against the Sabah Water Department and to sue them for MYR 100 million. This culminated in the Gempur Rasuah Sabah 2.0 protests in June, with participants harassed by the police, investigated for alleged offences, and even arrested.
In spite of this, they stood their ground – a reminder of the strength of the masses when they fight against the campaign of repression being mounted by the state.
The struggle of the anti-corruption movement and for Justice for Zara are two sides of the same coin. Both are battles against a system that tells ordinary workers and youth that their lives are worth less than profit, less than political stability, less than the comfort of the powerful. They are exposing how institutions that should serve us instead cover up violence, silence victims, and protect reputations over human lives.
From Protest to Power
Outrage is only the beginning. It won’t stay confined to campuses and vigils. It is developing amid a national crisis around soaring living costs, subsidy cuts, corruption rows, and the situation in Palestine – a crisis that drove nearly 20,000 Malaysians to the streets of KL to demand the resignation of Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim. The federal government is already beginning to fear what this movement in Sabah has unleashed, with Anwar Ibrahim hurrying to speak on the matter and urge calm.
The capitalist press speculates about trouble for Anwar Ibrahim and the federal government in Sabah’s upcoming elections, and claim “the case has been highly politicised”. They fail to see that this has always been a political matter for the people of Sabah, and the people of Malaysia – and that the crisis will only grow from here. The coming inquest into Zara’s death, and the paltry investigations into three senior police officials and five teenagers, will not appease or stifle the unrest now unleashed against the corruption and weakness of the federal government. The bullying epidemic is a social question. Prosecutions of a handful of teenagers cannot erase the institutional culture of violence fostered by austerity and authoritarian school management.
The dramatic scale of the protests across Sabah, alongside the emergence of a new radical force among the youth in the form of Suara Mahasiswa UMS (Universiti Malaysia Sabah), forcefully demonstrates that the masses of Malaysia are reawakening and beginning to take matters into their own hands. This is exactly what the ruling class fears – a movement of the masses that is not safely controlled by any of the established bourgeois parties.
We are seeing only the beginning stages of the process of the radicalisation of the Malaysian working class and youth. But this is set to deepen with the crisis of Anwar’s Madani government, which in turn is only a reflection of the deepening crisis of Malaysian and world capitalism.
What must come next is for the workers, students and rural communities to come together and organise against the system that keeps them in chains, while the government is allowed to act with impunity and the capitalists that the government serve can enrich themselves on the backs of the suffering of the poor. Only the organised power of the working class can bring this state of affairs to an end.
We must fight for democratic control over education, so that safety and standards are set by communities, not distant bureaucracies. For workers’ control over Sabah’s wealth and resources, so that they are used to build schools, hospitals, housing, and more – not siphoned off to line the pockets of the wealthy. And for mass mobilisation against corruption and repression, linking every fight – from campus to workplace – into a single movement with a single goal: a workers’ Sabah in a socialist Malaysia.
A Call to Organise
To prevent the next Zara, we demand independent, community-led inquiries into every case of abuse in schools; elected councils of parents, teachers, and students with the power to enforce safety in dormitories; and massive reinvestment in welfare staff, counsellors, and facilities. These are measures that millions can immediately recognise as necessary, but to win them, we must confront the capitalist state that refuses to fund education while siphoning wealth to cronies. Only through the organised power of workers and youth can such demands be forced, opening the road to a school system run democratically in the interests of the majority.
Ombak Revolusi calls on every reader to join us in helping build a revolutionary organisation that will make this a reality – to lead not just protests, but a movement to take power out of the hands of the ruling elite. To fight against corruption, for clean water, for safe schools, and more, in the united struggle of the working class.
Justice for Zara means justice for all. And justice for all means ending the system that allows lives like hers to be disregarded and cast aside in the first place.
Fight for a workers’ Sabah, for a socialist revolution in Malaysia!