KOTA KINABALU: The Sabah Progressive Party (SAPP), a Perikatan Nasional (PN) component party, will submit a motion on the Sabah identity card (Sabah IC) at the state assembly sitting next month.
SAPP deputy president Edward Dagul said party president and former chief minister Yong Teck Lee would table the motion.
He said the Sabah IC would be a mechanism to safeguard the citizenship status of Sabahans and allow the state government to weed out national identity cards, or MyKad, that were issued dubiously.
“The call for a Sabah IC has been highlighted and pursued for many years and it should be timely to implement it for the people of Sabah,” he said in a statement here today.
He also noted the heavy criticisms from Sabahans over the federal government’s proposal to issue a special card for foreigners in the state.
Dagul said SAPP had completed a working paper on the Sabah IC proposal, which took into account various aspects including its legality and the socio-economic implications.
He said the Sabah IC could resolve many issues, including cards under the Project IC, a term used to describe allegations of systematic granting of citizenship to migrants by giving them identification cards in the 1990s.
The Sabah IC would also address issues relating to phantom voters and the state’s undocumented natives, especially in remote interior areas, he added.
“Sabah IC is not a replacement for the Mykad, but a guarantee of protection of our rights as genuine Sabahans and deserving Malaysians,” he said.
Dagul added that Yong had previously presented the Sabah IC proposal to the Royal Commission of Inquiry (RCI) on illegal immigrants in Sabah, which was held in 2013.
He said various state leaders had also mooted the Sabah IC idea, including deputy chief minister and STAR president Jeffrey Kitingan as well as Warisan deputy president Darell Leiking. - FMT
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