SABAH, A TOTAL DENIAL STATE?

By: SAPP MEDIA

THE State Government should take the recent World Bank’s report that Sabah is still the poorest state in Malaysia as a constructive criticism and an impetus to double its efforts in poverty eradication, instead of being hostile and to swing into a ‘total denial’ state, said Sabah Progressive Party (SAPP) supreme council, Chong Pit Fah.

He asserted that both the Federal and the State governments should acknowledge that there is still much to be done to address the high poverty rate in Sabah, and to quickly identify the problems hindering poverty eradication in Sabah.

He contended that the State Government should also stop blaming and accusing the media of twisting the facts when they were merely highlighting the facts, especially when they (and their families) too are feeling the pinch of the ‘inconvenient truth’ of the sheer imbalance in their take home pay and the high cost of living in the state.

“As the matter of fact, many members of the local media organizations too had been complaining about difficulty to make ends meet due to their meager and stagnant salary, as compared to the high cost of living in Sabah which continues to escalate due to a high inflation rate,” he said in a statement issued here Friday.

He thus asked what concrete steps had been taken by the State government to reduce the high price of goods in Sabah.

He then took a swipe at the ‘1Malaysia’ slogan introduced-and-advocated by the Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak, describing it as ‘hollow-sounding’ and fraudulent to some extent in as far as Malaysians living in Sabah are concerned.

He explained that this is because until today, prices of goods across the board are still more expensive (some as high as 30% more) in Sabah as compared to Peninsular Malaysia.

“And to make thing worse, Sabahans who are already poor being denied job opportunities when jobs in the Federal government agencies which can always be given to qualified Sabahans were given to those from Peninsular Malaysia. Previously, almost 80 per cent of the staff in these departments and agencies are Sabahans but now it is the other way around,” he pointed out, citing the case of the deployment of about 400 computer technicians from Peninsular Malaysia to some of the schools in Sabah.

“Even Parti Bersatu Sabah President Tan Sri Joseph Pairin Kitingan had complained about these ‘imported’ officers,” he said.

Chong further noticed that in the recent years, Sabah had seen more second-hand vehicles bearing Peninsular Malaysia registration numbers, as compared to back in 1990s when there were only a handful of them and virtually none in the 1980s except for the government vehicles.

This, he said clearly indicated the poor financial position of a majority of Sabah people who could only afford to buy second-hand vehicles imported from Peninsular Malaysia.

He continued that there are plenty other indicators that SAPP could and would highlight from time to time, which he stressed the State Government should go down to the ground to find out for itself.

Towards this end, he said SAPP was rather skeptical that the State government’s target of zero-poverty by end of this year could be achievable.