Getting citizenship no problem for Sabah’s ‘stateless’

Middlemen are selling MyKads in Sabah for between RM5,000 and RM20,000 apiece, even as NRD admits that hopeful foreigners are lining up to get their bit of Malaysia.

KOTA KINABALU: Even as Malaysian-born Indians and native Orang Asli children in Peninsular Malaysia are forced to prove their legitimacy as citizens, over in Sabah the federal government is freely granting “stateless” children citizenship simply because it is “too expensive” to travel to report the birth of these children.

Why such “caring” sentiment is absent in the peninsula where there are so many stateless children is anyone’s guess, but suffice to note that in Sabah, the MyKads are for children from the mainly Muslim east coast sector where MP Shafie Apdal and state assemblyman Nasir Tun Sakaran are up against factionalism within Umno.

As questions continue to swirl over how so many children allegedly born in Sabah did not have birth certificates, Nasir, who is a minister in the Chief Minister’s Department, on Saturday passed the ball to the federal government on the matter.

Nasir said the mobile registration exercise to provide such a large number of birth certificates and MyKads to those in his Senallang constituency in Semporna was with the approval of Home Minister Hishammuddin Hussein and the National Registration Department.

As the issue threatens to boil over, Nasir told the local media on Saturday that many children on the various islands in the district had no birth certificates and that was reason why so many in his constituency were “stateless”.

“The majority of the people are fishermen who find it too expensive to travel all the way to the mainland just to report the birth of their children.

“Most are also unconcerned whether their children had birth certificates or not because for them, with or without documents, they still consider themselves Sabahans and Malaysians,” Nasir was quoted as saying.

The minister’s comments come after the Semporna Bumiputera Bajau Association (SBBA) sounded the alarm that foreigners were taking advantage of the exercise to be legalised in the state.

‘Not Sabahan’s children’

SBBA president Mansor Santiri, who focused the spotlight on the NRD exercise, called on the department to halt it immediately as “even community leaders were arranging for foreigners to get such documents”.

The association subsequently lodged a police report of the alleged fraud.

Talk in the state continues to dwell on how easy it is to buy Malaysian citizenship in the state, especially when elections loom.

Wilfred Bumburing, the BN MP for Tuaran, who has kept playing up the issue of how the population of the state had tripled in the space of a few years, has lent his voice to the controversy even as demands for a royal inquiry on the matter grow.

He said earlier this week that it was “unbelievable” there are so many children without birth certificates in the state, adding that the question that keeps popping up is who are these people as the dignity and sovereignty of the nation were at stake.

“I believe this is not true because the majority of Sabahans now are aware of the importance of registering their children soon after birth,” he said.

Bumburing also highlighted the bias of the ongoing exercise, saying some were getting Bumiputera (native) status while children of mixed-marriages were “downgraded”.

MyKads for up to RM20,000

Meanwhile, Sabah NRD director Ismail Ahmad said that every precaution is being taken to prevent fraud.

He, however, agreed that many foreigners “wait with the rest of the eligible people but … they won’t be entertained”.

The ongoing exercise began on Feb 20 and the NRD has stated that so far more than 3,067 Malaysians were without birth certificates.

According to sources, some in the business community in Labuan are openly charging “clients” RM2,000 to help them sort out the citizenship woes.

Word among the foreign workers is that a MyKad can be obtained through a middleman for between RM5,000 and RM20,000.