FACE THE TRUTHS ON SABAH POVERTY

By: DATUK YONG TECK LEE

THE Chief Minister and his ministers should stop trying to save face by claiming that poverty in Sabah is not as bad as it really is. The Chief Minister, like other ministers recently, had again used the so-called e-Kasih data to count the number of hardcore poor household heads (KIRMT) at 7,455 only.

In fact, on the ground, ‘e-Kasih’ has already been discredited as being ‘p-Kasih’ meaning ‘pilih kasih’ (favouritism) because e-Kasih involves cash handouts to selected persons. Not all poor people are registered under e-Kasih. Any grass roots leader who walks around a poor village will come across many hard core poor villagers who said they have been excluded from the e-Kasih programme.

The Chief Minister also said that the number of poor families stand at 24,247. The World Bank report on poverty in Malaysia had stated that 40% of Malaysia’s poor people live in Sabah, the poorest state in the country. Further, according to the federal minister of Agriculture and Agro-based Industry (Datuk Seri Noh Omar) recently, 150,000 families in Malaysia receive ‘rice subsidy coupons worth RM 10 each every month’. Obviously, these are poor families.

If 40% of these families are in Sabah, it gives a figure of 60,000 such families. Even if the figures by Noh Omar or the World Bank were not 100% accurate, still the figure of poor people is way above the 24,247. The 9th Malaysia Plan mid-term report by the federal Economic Planning Unit had listed Sabah as the poorest State at 23% poverty level, the highest in Malaysia. These are hard facts.

In view of the increase in cost of living in Sabah, it is important for the government to make public the latest data that is used to calculate the poverty line at which a family is classified as poor. What is the poverty line income for a family of five in the rural area and for the urban area? Has this poverty line taken into consideration the latest increases in prices of basic necessities?

Every villager knows that the costs of goods and transport have gone up repeatedly in the last two years, starting with the drastic fuel increases in June 2008. In some remote regions like Banggi, the so-called fuel subsidy scheme to transport rice, sugar and other necessities to keep prices low has collapsed when their budget for fuel was exhausted last month. Even the ‘20 cents’ plastic tubes of cooking oil, sugar and other basic necessities in Sandakan villages have shrunk in size.

Social indicators like lack of teachers, doctors, infant mortality, piped water, housing and landlessness compound the misery faced by the poor people in Sabah.

The Chief Minister should not deny the serious poverty in Sabah. Instead, he should use these real facts and figures expedite poverty reduction programmes and to demand from the federal government more affirmative action’s and a more favourable policy framework that spurs economic growth, reduce costs of doing business in Sabah, assist local workers and alleviate youth unemployment.

In the past generation, families at least had their children to earn some income to sustain the families. Education has always been a means to take a poor family out of the poverty cycle once the young children have been educated and gainfully employed. This has happened in many countries and societies.

But in Malaysia, our educational system has failed our younger generation by producing many illiterate school leavers with little skills. The over reliance on foreign workers has aggravated manpower planning and low productivity in the work force. These are the issues that the World Bank had identified but the BN politicians have chosen to brush aside these ‘inconvenient truths’.