MASIDI MUST RESOLVE TOUR GUIDES SHORTAGE’

SLAP......Tourism Minister Ng Yen Yen's decision to allow foreigners to become tour guides in Sabah is a slap in the face for state Tourism Minister Masidi Manjun.

By : QUEVILLE TO

TAWAU: The lack of foreign language-speaking tour guides in Sabah has exposed the haphazard planning for the multi-billion-ringgit industry at both state and federal levels.

The federal government’s decision to permit foreign tour guides to work in the state to address the problem of the limited number of multi-lingual local guides has created a new problem for locals in the business who fear their livelihoods are at stake.

Tourism Minister Ng Yen Yen has come under fire for the decision in a state that is already reeling from unemployment problems. Its trained and untrained youth are forced to look for jobs in either the peninsula or Singapore where salaries are higher.

The decision has met with disbelief by many in the industry as well as lawmakers in the state who questioned the seeming encroachment of a federal minister onto state turf.

A day after Sepanggar MP Eric Majimbun criticised the decision as ill-thought, his Tawau counterpart Chua Soon Bui said the Sabah Tourism, Culture and Environment Ministry has some explaining to do regarding the matter.

She said she was astonished that the state government was putting the livelihood and fate of local workers in the hands of their federal counterpart.

Chua said this when commenting on the Sabah Tour Guides Association’s (STGA) objection to the Federal Tourism Ministry’s decision to allow Korean nationals to be employed as tour guides in Sabah.

Ng said this week that the South Korean government through its embassy in Kuala Lumpur had made a request to have more Korean-speaking guides in Sabah and the government had agreed to license Koreans to be trained as tour guides as a temporary measure until the STGA could increase the number of its Korean-speaking guides.

She said the move was necessary as there were simply not enough Korean-speaking tour guides in Sabah to cater to the growing number of tourists to the state from that country.

More than 40,000 Koreans came to visit Sabah this year between January and June, with only eight Korean-speaking guides to cater to them. Last year, 36,422 Koreans visited Sabah while for the first six months of this year there have been 43,873 arrivals.

‘Big slap to Masidi’

However, Chua said Ng’s failure to consult her Sabah counterparts including the STGA on the matter before making such an important decision again revealed the lack of coordination and intrusion into state affairs by federal leaders.

She said the decision was “a big slap to the state Barisan Nasional government and [minister] Masidi [Manjun] in particular”.

The federal ministry’s decision, she said, also reflected on Masidi’s performance and his inability to address the perennial issue of shortage of multi-lingual local tour guides and forced his federal counterpart to dictate the fate of the local tour guides.

Chua, who is also a vice-president of the Sabah Progressive Party (SAPP), said Masidi had no excuse for failing to address the problem since it was not new.

“I believe the problem could have been long resolved if our state minister had given due attention to it. He certainly owes the Sabah tourism fraternity a good explanation as to why he failed to address the problem,” she said.

She reminded Masidi who once headed the state’s main think-tank, the Institute for Development Studies Sabah (IDS), that his ministry had commissioned IDS in 2010 to undertake a review of the current 15-year Sabah Tourism Master Plan (STMP) and formulate the second STMP for 2011-2025.

“What happened to the studies and review? Doesn’t it also cover the problem of shortage of Korean-speaking local tour guides?” asked Chua.