WHAT STOPPED ON 20 SEPTEMBER, AND WHAT DID NOT

On 20 September, the Ruler removed his whole Executive Council.

Ten members, gone by one signature.

The Menteri Besar says they remain in office.¹Istana Besar Seri Menanti statement of 20 September 2026, citing Articles XXXVIII(5) and XXXVIII(2), as reported by Malay Mail and Bernama; the Menteri Besar’s reply was reported on 21 September 2026 (FMT; Malay Mail).

The palace’s side says they do not. Both sides argue about who is right.

This essay asks a quieter question.

Whoever is right, who is actually running the state today?

By ‘running’, I mean the ordinary machinery: paying salaries, signing routine papers, keeping the lights on.

That machinery is not the same as the machine of politics, which asks who governs and who was rightly sacked.²The distinction was first drawn in 2/NS: ‘machine’ for a single mechanism of power, ‘machinery’ for the collective apparatus that keeps a state running underneath it.

TWO DOCUMENTS, EASILY CONFUSED

The revocation was gazetted on 24 September, four days after it was announced.³Gazette notice reported by The Edge Malaysia, 24 September 2026: ‘Yang di-Pertuan Besar Negeri Sembilan Tuanku Muhriz Tuanku Munawir withdraws his consent to the appointment of the 10 councilors for breaching their oath of loyalty to the state ruler.’

Two days after that, the Attorney General spoke. He said the revocation was valid, and gave his reason: Article XXXVIII(5) puts every Exco member but the Menteri Besar at the Ruler’s pleasure.⁴Attorney General Tan Sri Mohd Dusuki Mokhtar, reported 26 September 2026 (Newswav; Malaysiakini; Malay Mail), citing ‘Article 38(5) of the Laws of the Constitution of Negeri Sembilan 1959’.

That is the same clause Essay 16/NS already set out. Nothing here is new law. It is a federal officer’s opinion on an old one.

Four days earlier, the AGC had already said something narrower and easily missed: a sacked Exco has no power to suspend anyone, because a sacked Exco is not an Exco at all.[mfn]Reported 22 September 2026 (FMT), on the sacked Exco’s attempt to suspend two state officials.[/mfn]

That second statement is the one that matters here. It is not about who governs. It is about what stops the moment the Exco stops existing.

WHO STILL SIGNS

One office was never touched.

The Ruler’s revocation reached ‘every Exco member other than the Menteri Besar’. The clause says so in terms.⁵Laws of the Constitution of Negeri Sembilan 1959, Art XXXVIII(5).

So the Menteri Besar’s own seat did not move on 20 September. Whatever else is disputed, he still holds his own office, and still exercises whatever the law gives to that office alone.

Two more offices did not move either, for a different reason: they were never the Ruler’s to remove.

Most Malaysian states, by their own enactments, turn two administrative posts into corporations in their own right: the State Secretary, and the State Financial Officer.⁶The pattern is general across the states; Negeri Sembilan’s own incorporating enactments for these two offices were not pinned to primary text this session — see the verification note.

A corporation sole can sign, hold property, and be sued, in its own name, apart from whoever sits in the Exco that year.

That is the whole point of incorporating an office rather than a person. The office outlives the argument above it.

So salaries are paid. Contracts already running are honoured. The daily paperwork of a state does not simply stop because ten chairs stand empty.

WHAT DOES STOP

Not everything survives an empty Exco.

Malaysia’s National Land Code gives real teeth to the phrase ‘State Authority’, and vests it, formally, in the Ruler.⁷National Land Code (Act 828), s 5. The precise operative wording was not independently re-checked against the current Reprint this session; see the verification note.

In practice that power runs through the Exco and the Land Administrator. A land decision that needs the Exco’s collective mind, rather than a single officer’s routine act, has nowhere to go until the Exco exists again.

The same is true of anything the law commits to ‘the Exco in Council’, rather than to a named officer: new policy, new spending outside what is already budgeted, and any decision the statute books say only a Council, not a person, may take.

So the honest picture is not paralysis, and it is not business as usual either. It is a state running on the decisions it already made, with no one able to make new ones of the kind an Exco alone may make.

THREE STATES THAT HAVE BEEN HERE BEFORE

Negeri Sembilan is not the first place to ask who runs a government whose top has come apart.

Perak, 2009

Two men claimed to be Menteri Besar. The Secretariat cleared one man’s office and gave it to the other.⁸2009 Perak constitutional crisis; state secretariat’s actions of 6 February 2009, as recorded in the published account of the crisis.

When the Assembly itself was shut to them, the ousted side sat under a tree in the Secretariat car park and passed their own resolutions.⁹The ‘Democracy tree’ assembly, 3 March 2009; three motions passed 27–0.

The civil service did not referee the constitutional question. It followed whoever held the building.

Papua New Guinea, 2011 to 2012

For a year, PNG had two Prime Ministers, two Governors-General, two police commissioners, and two cabinets, all at once.¹⁰The Diplomat and CSIS, December 2011: parallel claims by Peter O’Neill and Sir Michael Somare, following a Supreme Court ruling and a competing Act of Parliament.

Government did not stop. It split. Each side ran what it could reach, and police loyalty itself divided along the same line.

Samoa, 2021

Parliament’s doors were locked against the newly elected government. Its ministers were sworn in under a tent on the front lawn instead.¹¹2021 Samoan constitutional crisis; tent swearing-in of Fiame Naomi Mata’afa, 24 May 2021.

For two months, Samoa had a government the courts had not yet blessed, and a caretaker government the voters had already dismissed. The courts, not the civil service, finally settled which was which.¹²Samoa Court of Appeal, 23 July 2021, reversing the Supreme Court and holding the tent government had been the lawful one since 24 May.

WHAT THE THREE HAVE IN COMMON

None of the three was settled by the office boy at the front desk.

In each, the machinery kept moving under whoever actually held the keys, the payroll system, and the seal, right up until politics or a court decided who was entitled to hold them.

That is the oldest rule in this field, older than any of the three episodes. The common law has long protected what a person did while holding an office in fact, even where his title to it is later found wanting, so that ordinary people are not made to pay for a fight they had no part in.¹³The de facto officer doctrine, recognised across the Commonwealth; the leading Malaysian authority for Negeri Sembilan specifically was not pinned down this session, and should be confirmed before publication.

Negeri Sembilan’s machinery is, on the facts so far, closer to Perak than to Port Moresby. There is one Secretariat, not two. One payroll, not two. No one has yet had to choose between two rival office-holders standing at the same door.

SO WHO IS GOVERNING NEGERI SEMBILAN NOW

The honest answer has two halves.

The Menteri Besar still holds his own office, whatever else is disputed about him.

The State Secretary and the State Financial Officer keep the ordinary business of the state moving, because the law made their offices bigger than any one Exco.

But no one, today, can make the kind of decision only an Exco can make. Not the Ruler’s revocation, not the Menteri Besar’s denial of it, fills that particular chair.

Until the Exco exists again, in whatever form the Constitution finally recognises, that part of the state’s machinery is not broken.

It is simply switched off, waiting for someone with the undisputed key to turn it back on.

∞§∞

This article is for general information only and is not legal or technical advice. Seek independent legal advice where appropriate.

Thanks to KN Geetha, TP Vaani, JN Lheela and Lydia Jaynthi of GK Legal, and Jakub Zerdzicki of Unsplash for the image. Claude (Anthropic) assisted with drafting and Perplexity Pro with fact-checking; the author is solely responsible for all views and errors.

© GK Ganesan Kasinathan. All rights reserved. No part of this site’s content may be used without prior written permission: gk@gkganesan.com.