How did the Sabah poor vanish?

STAR’s Jambun takes Najib to task over his statement about poverty reduction.

KOTA KINABALU: Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak continues to draw angry reactions with his recent assertion that Sabah is no longer the poorest state in Malaysia.

Opposition leaders have expressed shock, and one of them, Daniel John Jambun, said today that the statement was “unacceptable and insulting”.

In an article published in local newspapers, Jambun, who is STAR Sabah’s deputy chairman, demanded that the Statistics Department corroborate Najib’s statement with verifiable data.

According to him, Sabahans are “scornful” of the statement and “believe it is all a desperate political spin to give a positive impact for Najib’s visit to Sabah prior to the general election”.

Speaking on Feb 17 in Kampung Nala, about 60km from Lahad Datu, Najib said Sabah had surpassed Kelantan in per capita income, with the number of hardcore poor households reduced from 30,000 to 7,000.

Jambun noted that he did not mention how long it took to achieve the reduction.

He said it was an insult to imply that Sabah deserved to be compared only with the second poorest state in Malaysia. “Why not compare us with Selangor and Penang? If we had crept past the second poorest state, the progress wasn’t much and it meant we had to struggle on our knees just to do that.”

He reminded Sabah BN leaders that when the World Bank submitted its report to the state government in November 2010, its representative Emmanuel Jimenez described Sabah as the poorest state in Malaysia and likely to stay that way for “a considerable length of time given current efforts in poverty eradication”.

Mismanaged programmes

The report, he added, “specifically said that the bottom line was that Malaysia’s economic planning in Sabah so far had not been for inclusive growth”. He interpreted this as meaning that the growth strategy “did not include most of the state’s economic sectors and excluded most of the people”.

“My question is how did those poor people suddenly disappear?” Jambun said.

“Certainly it was not because of any fantastic government effort. All those poverty eradication programmes didn’t work and aren’t working. The i-Azam Wanita 1Malaysia (a rural economic financing programme for women) has not made any impact in Sabah, the e-Kasih has been widely accused of being implemented with ‘pilih kasih’ (favouritism) and the PPRT (a housing programme for the hardcore poor) is being abused to reward Umno supporters who are already doing well financially.

“They are all not achieving their targets as planned although the government has bragged they would be bringing poverty down. The government actually has not even taken into account the force of high inflation, which is killing off whatever small effects are coming from these mismanaged programmes.

“So what the people are really getting is the receding value of their incomes in the face of the skyrocketing cost of living, which is causing dramatic increases in urban poverty.

“Because of this inflation, even government servants have to depend on Ah Longs to make ends meet.

“Employment and business opportunities are scarce. What you see in the local newspapers are court summonses and bankruptcy notices. As of June 2010, 218,561 Malaysians have gone bankrupt, and worse, Malaysia itself is feared to be going bankrupt by 2019.”

Economic strangulation

Jambun accused the BN government of causing poverty in Sabah by draining resources from the state without giving back sufficiently in the form of economic development.

“Do Umno-BN leaders want to keep Sabah poor so that the people here have to continue being beholden to them?”

He said Najib’s statement that Sabah had great potential was both insulting and hypocritical.

“He knows very well how the federal government is denying Sabah a lot of potential growth by taking away 95% of our oil, taking a massive collection of taxes from Sabah, giving us small development allocations, perpetuating the cabotage policy which is accelerating inflation in Sabah and Sarawak, and taking lands in Sabah for Felcra and Felda which do not contribute much to the state economy.

“All these policies are strangling Sabah’s economy, have contributed to us becoming the poorest state. So where are we going with this great potential that we are supposed to have now? All I can see is that Sabah has great potential for the federal government to exploit it further, and to be treated as a fixed deposit for the BN.”

Jambun also mentioned a report about widespread illiteracy in Ulu Paitan. “The report talks about people being unable to attend school due to impossible distances between their villages and the nearest schools,” he said. “If that is not abject poverty, I don’t know what is.”

He said he could continue citing “thousands of examples” of pervasive poverty. “We can even provide graphic pictures of people living in abject poverty in the interior. We have known and have spoken about this for a long time. So when the chief executive of the land comes here and declares most of our poverty has disappeared, it is just unacceptable and insulting.”