PKR must continue to serve as a mass movement that upholds integrity, social justice, unity and the people’s trust, rather than merely as a vehicle for winning elections, its president Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim said. Bernama pic
KUALA LUMPUR: PKR must continue to serve as a mass movement that upholds integrity, social justice, unity and the people's trust, rather than merely as a vehicle for winning elections, its president Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim said.
In a Facebook post today, the Prime Minister said these principles were crucial to efforts to build a more dignified, prosperous and just Malaysia for all.
Wishing delegates a meaningful PKR National Congress 2026, Anwar said he hoped the gathering would serve as a platform for introspection, allowing the party to assess its achievements and strengthen its resolve to advance the Reformasi agenda.
"May Allah SWT bless all our efforts for our beloved homeland, Insya-Allah," he said.
The two-day PKR National Congress 2026 begins tomorrow at the Melaka International Trade Centre (MITC) in Ayer Keroh, Melaka, under the theme "Memugar Reformasi, Membina Madani" (Revitalising Reformasi, Building Madani).
The congress is seen as an important platform for the party to strengthen its direction while reinvigorating the spirit of the Reformasi struggle that formed the foundation of PKR as it navigates the current political landscape.
Anwar is scheduled to officiate the congress tomorrow and deliver his policy speech, which is expected to outline the party's strategic agenda and direction. - NST
TUARAN: A four-wheel-drive vehicle was badly damaged after a fallen tree landed on it along Jalan Bolong, near Sekolah Kebangsaan (SK) Pekan Tuaran, here, this afternoon.
The male driver, an adult, escaped with minor injuries and was taken to Tuaran Hospital by members of the public for treatment.
The incident is believed to have occurred at about 3.30pm in good weather.
The Tuaran Civil Defence Force (APM) received a call through the 999 emergency line about a fallen tree that had struck a vehicle and blocked the main road along Jalan Bolong.
In a statement tonight, APM said the complainant was travelling towards Pekan Tuaran when he saw a fallen tree on a four-wheel-drive vehicle.
"Concerned for his safety and that of other road users, the complainant immediately contacted the 999 emergency line for assistance.
"The complainant also informed us that an adult male involved in the incident had been taken by members of the public to Tuaran Hospital for treatment," it said.
APM said 5 personnel were dispatched to the scene.
"Upon arrival, they found a rain tree estimated to be 60 feet tall and about 2 adults' arm spans in circumference had fallen onto a white Toyota SR 2.8 four-wheel-drive vehicle and blocked both lanes of the main road," it said.
The team then cut up and removed the fallen tree with the cooperation of the Public Works Department (JKR) and members of the public.
The road was reopened to traffic after the tree was safely removed and the area cleared. - NST
WHEN we talk about food security, we usually picture empty supermarket shelves or the price of onions suddenly shooting up.
But the truth is, it is much bigger than that.
It is about whether your family can afford a proper meal next month, whether a farmer in Kedah can survive another unpredictable monsoon, and whether Malaysia can keep feeding itself when global markets go haywire.
So when the government says it is drafting a National Food Security Act, this is a big deal. The government has said the legislation will provide a stronger legal foundation for food security, while the Agriculture and Food Security Minister has said the Bill is expected to be tabled in Parliament in 2027.
But here’s the catch: if this ends up as another thick document filled with broad goals and good intentions, we will have wasted a massive opportunity.
Malaysia already has policies covering the food system, including the National Agrofood Policy 2021-2030 and the newly launched National Food Security Policy 2030.
The latest policy sets out a broader framework covering availability, accessibility, utilisation, stability, sustainability and agency.
Yet the latest data show why we cannot afford to simply congratulate ourselves and move on.
Malaysia’s Food Security Index improved from 54.5 in 2023 to 61.5 in 2024. Great. But the Availability Index actually fell from 54.3 to 50.0. The Utilisation Index, which covers aspects related to nutrition and food safety, stood at 50.4.
That’s the thing about food security: having food in the market does not automatically mean we are secure, and having enough to eat does not necessarily mean people are eating well.
This new Act needs teeth.
First, look beyond rice.
Yes, rice is king. But we cannot survive on rice alone. The Act should take a broader view of the foods Malaysians actually depend on, including vegetables, fish, poultry and eggs, with measurable targets for strengthening domestic supply where appropriate.
Second, prepare for the worst, not just react to it.
Floods happen. Droughts happen. Diseases can wipe out livestock. Geopolitical tensions can disrupt supply chains and send input costs soaring. The government has already identified the need for early-warning systems and contingency plans under the proposed legislation.
The Act should make those mechanisms clear: who acts, when the plan is triggered, what reserves can be released and how assistance reaches farmers and food producers.
We should not wait for panic-buying before we start moving.
Third, affordability has to be part of food security.
It does not matter how secure the national supply looks on paper if a low-income family cannot afford nutritious food.
Support measures should therefore go beyond simply keeping headline prices low. They should ensure vulnerable households, including children and older people, can actually afford a healthy diet.
Fourth, put farmers first, for once.
We keep telling young people to go into technology, finance and other supposedly modern industries. But who is going to grow our food?
If we want agriculture to attract the next generation, it has to be a viable career. Farmers need fair returns, access to affordable inputs, protection against climate and production risks, and secure access to productive land.
A farmer should not feel like a gambler every time they plant a crop.
And we need to stop treating agricultural land as land that is simply waiting for something more profitable to be built on it.
Productive farmland is a strategic national resource. Once it disappears under concrete, we cannot simply produce more of it when the next food crisis arrives.
Finally, give the law real accountability.
We need an annual report to Parliament, not just another press release. How much are we importing? How resilient are our domestic supplies? Are strategic reserves sufficient? Are farmers actually benefiting from government programmes?
The government should not be allowed to mark its own homework.
At the end of the day, this Act is an opportunity to stop being reactive. It can give Malaysia a framework for dealing with the next flood, drought, disease outbreak, geopolitical shock or global supply disruption before it becomes a crisis.
The question is not simply: Can we afford to import enough food today?
It is: Can we feed our people in 10, 20 or 50 years, whatever happens to the rest of the world?
That is the law we need.
One that protects our farmers, our families and our future.
Not another policy that looks good on paper, but a law with enough teeth to make sure that when the next crisis comes, Malaysia is ready.
KT Maran is a Focus Malaysia viewer.
The views expressed are solely of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.
FOR years, researchers, government agencies and civil society organisations have studied the challenges faced by communities living in Malaysia’s Projek Perumahan Rakyat (PPR).
We know about broken lifts and ageing buildings. We have data on household incomes, health, education, sanitation, safety and social wellbeing.
Researchers have conducted surveys and community-based studies, while residents themselves have repeatedly spoken about the conditions in which they live.
Yet many of the same problems remain.
I was reminded of this recently when I attended a roundtable discussion on PPR communities organised by Persatuan Sains Sosial Malaysia (PSSM).
Listening to researchers and practitioners from different fields, it became increasingly clear that our problem is not necessarily that we do not know enough. It is that much of what we know remains fragmented across institutions, disciplines and sectors.
A housing agency may see maintenance problems. A health agency may see disease or poor sanitation. A social agency may identify vulnerable households, while an urban planner sees deficiencies in the built environment and an economist sees economic insecurity.
The resident, however, does not experience life in those categories.
(Image: The Star/Yap Chee Hong)
A broken lift is not simply a maintenance issue when an older resident cannot easily leave the building. Poor waste management does not remain an environmental problem when it attracts pests and creates health risks.
An unsafe common area affects not only security but also whether children can play outside and neighbours feel comfortable spending time together.
For a family already struggling financially, each additional problem can make the others more difficult to manage.
What institutions separate into different portfolios is experienced by residents as one life.
This becomes especially important when we look at what the existing evidence is telling us.
Research presented at the roundtable found that 61% of residents across 10 PPR communities in the Klang Valley had lived in the same homes for between 10 and 30 years.
For many families, therefore, PPR housing is not a temporary stage before moving elsewhere. It is home.
More than 70% were also found to be vulnerable to economic shocks, while 75% reported that their stress had either not improved or had worsened since the Covid-19 pandemic.
Seen separately, these are statistics about housing, economics and wellbeing. Seen together, they begin to describe the environment in which families are trying to build their lives.
My own work as a scientist has shown me why connecting these different forms of knowledge matters. Residents often notice changes long before they appear in a dataset.
They speak about overflowing waste, increasing numbers of pests or deteriorating environmental conditions because these are things they encounter every day.
Those observations can become important starting points for scientific investigation.
In our research involving 394 residents from 19 public housing schemes in the Klang Valley, we investigated intestinal parasitic infections together with associated behavioural and environmental factors.
The findings provided biological evidence of a health burden associated with the environments in which people live, with wider public health implications.
This is why lived experience and scientific evidence should not be treated as competing forms of knowledge.
A resident describing what is happening around her home is not merely offering anecdotal evidence. She may be identifying a problem that researchers can then investigate systematically. Science can help us understand its scale, causes and consequences.
The difficulty begins when those pieces of knowledge never meet.
This is what makes Think City’s “From Roof to Resilience: A Social Assessment of Malaysia’s Public Housing” a useful contribution. Drawing on the lived realities of 2,884 households across 10 public housing sites, the assessment examines public housing through multiple lenses rather than treating housing simply as a question of buildings.
Such an approach creates room for knowledge from fields as different as parasitology, social anthropology and urban planning to sit alongside socioeconomic evidence and, importantly, what communities themselves are saying.
(Image: NSTP/Azhar Ramli)
The question then becomes less about which discipline has the best explanation and more about how these perspectives can help us understand the relationships between the problems residents experience.
This also gives weight to the report’s recommendation for a high-level task force reporting to the Prime Minister, with stronger coordination across agencies and stakeholders and a long-term roadmap for transforming public housing towards 2057, when Malaysia marks 100 years of independence.
For such a task force to make a difference, however, it cannot simply become another administrative layer.
It would need to bring together housing, health, local government, social protection, education, urban planning, environmental management, researchers and civil society. Most importantly, PPR residents themselves must have a meaningful place in that conversation.
Its task should begin not with commissioning yet another study, but by asking what we already know, where that knowledge sits, what remains missing and why so much of the evidence collected over the years has struggled to translate into coordinated action.
There will always be a need for new research. Communities change, new challenges emerge and policies must respond. But another report sitting on another institutional shelf will accomplish little if the knowledge inside it remains disconnected from everything else we know.
PPR residents have been describing their realities for years. Social scientists have documented their experiences. Scientists have measured some of the health and environmental consequences. Government agencies hold administrative data that reveal other parts of the picture.
None of these perspectives is sufficient on its own. Together, however, they can show us something much closer to the whole.
Perhaps the first step towards better public housing is not another solution designed from within another silo. It is learning to listen across those silos, and recognising that the lives of PPR residents were never divided into them in the first place.
The author is Prof Dr Siti Nursheena Mohd Zain, Deputy Executive Director (Research, Innovation and Development), Institute of Public Policy and Management (INPUMA), Universiti Malaya.
The views expressed are solely of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.
