‘Musa lying about poverty level in the state’

Sabah government's poverty eradication drive is a failure, says opposition Sabah Progressive Party.

KOTA KINABALU: The plight of widow Rosnia Marambal, who caught the attention of Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak’s wife Rosmah Mansor, is proof that hardcore poverty still exists in the state.

According to the opposition in Sabah, Chief Minister Musa Aman is bluffing that hardcore poverty has been wiped out in the state.

Luyang state constituency representative Melanie Chia said Rosnia who failed to get government assistance despite the authorities knowing of her condition only served to show that the government is in denial of the poverty situation Sabah.

Chia, who is also Sabah Progressive Party (SAPP) women’s wing chief, said the squalor in which Rosnia and her three children lived in is testimony that Sabah is still one of the poorest states in Malaysia.

“The fact that Sabah is still one of the poorest states in Malaysia cannot be denied by the Sabah government. No matter how strongly it has refuted this in the past, it remains a fact that Sabah still has the most poor people in Malaysia, and not just poor, but hardcore poor.

“Rosnia’s case is just a tip of the iceberg of the poverty situation in Sabah,” she said.

Chia said the acknowledgement by Kota Marudu MP Maximus Ongkili that there are over 2,000 hardcore poor households in Kota Marudu is disturbing.

Ongkili, the Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation, said the government is trying to resolve the problem under the National Key Results Area (NKRA) and he hopes to take Kota Marudu out of poverty within the next five years.

His statement was a direct refutation of a boast by Musa that hardcore poverty would be wiped out by the end of last year.

The state Umno-led BN coalition government has found itself in the embarrassing position of defending itself after a World Bank report last year revealed that Sabah has the highest level of poverty in the country.

The disclosure angered the state government which had only a year earlier declared that it had wiped out hardcore poverty in Tawau district on the east coast and was well on its way to raising the standard of living in the state.

“Unfortunately, we still get reports of abject poverty in the State,” Chia said and questioned how the state government was implementing the poverty eradication programme for which millions of ringgit had been allocated and spent over a 10 -year period during the 8th and 9th Malaysia Plans.

Billions spent not reaching target group

She said it was disgraceful that Ongkili had failed to highlight the poverty situation in his constituency until now and was only doing so after Rosmah had expressed shocked at the Rosnia’s condition.

“If not for the media exposure of her case, she would still not be receiving any attention from the relevant authorities entrusted with poverty eradication efforts,” Chia noted.

“There has been so many reports on poverty in the past few years… the many social visits by NGOs and even a visit to Kampung Morion in Kota Marudu by the Croatian Ambassador to personally help a poverty stricken family.

“The least the Kota Marudu MP could do is to appreciate the contributions by the civil society and all quarters in helping and heeding to the pleas of the needy.

“Perhaps he (Ongkili) could also help to ensure that there is a greater degree of efficiency and accountability of the public spending,” Chia said.

The plight of Rosnia and her family and many others in a similar situation has exposed the ‘e-Kasih programme’ as faulty and critics are asking how could the government with all its resources not know about it all these years.

“It means that the billions of dollars spent is not reaching the target group,” said Chia, pointing out that it was well known that there are many more living in destitute conditions.

Chia said the fact that thousands of youths from the northern region of the state had left home to find work in the peninsula should have alerted the government to the fact that the situation is alarming.

“They left their families to find work in KL and some even got stranded there,” she noted.