On Feb 8, the nation celebrates what would have been the 109th birthday of Tunku Abdul Rahman Putra Al-Haj, the father of Malaysia. On the same day, the Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs (IDEAS) will be two years old. We will hold a free public event to commemorate both Tunku’s birthday and our anniversary on Saturday, Feb 11, at Memorial Tunku Abdul Rahman in Kuala Lumpur.

I am pleased that in the two short years, we have achieved quite a lot for a small think tank. The icing on the cake was when we were announced the 13th best new think tank in the world by a global think tank survey published by the University of Pennsylvania last month.

Like for any other start-up, our journey has not been smooth. We are just a small team of individuals who want to do something good for the country. We do not have connections with the top, let alone the resources like some other well-connected organisations.

The most important thing for us is the freedom and independence to say things as we see it, without the need to sugarcoat our comments. This means we have to steer carefully in the heavily partisan waters of Malaysian politics. Many times we have been accused of siding with Pakatan Rakyat, only to be accused a few days later of being a tool of Barisan Nasional.

I suppose the public, and policymakers, are still trying to judge where we “belong”. And in doing so, they try to box us in the traditional pro-government versus anti-government quarters. This is impossible to do. We side with the principles of rule of law, limited state, free market and individual liberty — which Tunku consistently promoted — not with any particular political party.

Some friends suggest that we should find a government “godfather” who can provide us patronage. But there are already too many “government-linked yayasan” (charities and foundations) crowding the civil society market, in exactly the same way government-linked companies crowd out true entrepreneurs. We do not want to be another pseudo-yayasan — entities that are actually mere agencies of vested political interests masquerading as non-governmental organisations.

Policymakers in Malaysia really should look into making it easier to do good. I was involved in the setting up of four charities when I lived in England. When I moved back to Kuala Lumpur to set up IDEAS, I was under the impression that it should not be too difficult to form a charity/foundation here.

All the charities that I helped to set up in England took just around a month each to be registered and the process was straightforward too. You know exactly what you need to do and what documents to submit. The costs were minimal because the bulk of it could be done through the Charity Commission’s website. So, how difficult can it be back home?

How wrong I was!

It turned out that forming a yayasan in Malaysia is not an easy thing. It is as if our bureaucracy is bent on making life difficult for those who want to do good. Registering a yayasan is a convoluted process with so many uncertainties. Try searching online for an official guideline and I bet you will not find one.

Do you know which ministry or government agency looks after these yayasan? Well, to register IDEAS, we had to deal with officials from at least four different agencies, none of which could provide a clear picture of who is responsible for what.

In the end, it took us 15 months, plus many angry phone calls and frustrated meetings, before we received our registration certificate. And it cost us almost RM25,000 in fees and staff time. Yet that is not the end of the story. We will still have to wait many more months and spend even more money to apply for tax exemption. It turns out that becoming registered does not mean you are tax-exempt. You still need to get a different set of approvals from a different authority.

Of course, ours is only one case study. A senior officer with a government-linked investment company (GLIC) once told me that he managed to register a new foundation for his GLIC in just four months after a certain “Tan Sri called up the minister”. If this major GLIC with all its resources and high-level contacts took four months to get it done, what hope does a typical Malaysian have if he doesn’t have the right phone numbers to call?

If we look at the bigger picture, civil society entities such as yayasan are part of the wider private sector. Real charities — not the pseudo-yayasan set up by vested political interests — are actually private entities set up by private individuals to do good things for the country. In many countries, for example in Germany — as discussed in IDEAS’ latest research paper on social market economy — civil society organisations and foundations play important roles to deliver public services, which in Malaysia are still monopolised by the government.

The potential to develop the “third” sector as an important facet of our nation’s growth still exists. To do that, the government must first recognise the potential and then commit to making it easier to set up charities or foundations. The haphazard registration process and the multiplicity of agencies handling registration must be fixed. It is time we considered the establishment of a Malaysian Charity Commission.

Wan Saiful Wan Jan is chief executive of the Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs (www.IDEAS.org.my)

This article appeared in the Forum page of The Edge Malaysia, Issue 896, Feb 6-12, 2012