Stop whining, poor Sabahans told

Charlie Rudai

Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin has admitted that the government is unable to do much for the landless and hardcore poor mainly due to incompetence of its leaders.

TONGOD: Poor Sabahans should stop whinning and be satisfied with their lot because the poverty situation in Sabah was not as bad as that faced by citizens in China and India.

Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin said that since starvation did not exist in Malaysia, there should be no complaints about the poverty situation in the state.

Drawing comparisons with countries like China, India and other developed countries, he said that unlike others there had been no reports of people dying of starvation in Malaysia.

He said that in some countries the poverty issue was so critical that some of the people there were earning about one dollar a day and coping with the issue of starvation unlike Malaysia.

Last year, the World Bank Report revealed Sabah to be the poorest state in Malaysia. According to the report, 40% of Malaysia’s poor were centred in Sabah, which incidentally is an oil and gas hub. The state government, however, has vehemently disputed the categorisation.

Muhyiddin also made a staggering revelation that the Barisan Nasional (BN) government has been unable to do much for the landless and hardcore poor in the country mainly due to incompetence of its leaders.

He took a swipe at ruling party political leaders for not doing their jobs and not articulating the problems they faced.

Citing Kinabatangan, he said he had been ignorant until now that the constituency is much bigger than Pahang, and was shocked to know that Tongod itself was bigger than Selangor.

Muhyiddin claimed it was not easy to bring development to Sabah until political leaders went down to the ground to study and understand the needs of the people.

Infrastructure projects

He sees the whole problem of poverty eradication and development as an infrastructure issue.

“So how to bring development to Sabah and Sarawak? … the only way is to provide better infrastructure.

“In this respect, Sabah and Sarawak get the priority from the federal government… millions of ringgit are being poured in to implement infrastructure projects.

“I monitor every month and listen to the ministers during meetings,” he said, adding that under the 10th Malaysia Plan, RM320 million had been approved for various projects in the Kinabatangan parliamentary constituency alone.

However, he said that the government would give out funds according to priority and not all at once to prevent bankrupting the country.

“It is like in a family: when you give a present to one child, the other children also want it but a family with a small income would not be able to do so.

“Similarly, the nation will go bankrupt if it fulfils the demands of all the people,” he said.

Muhyiddin assured that Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak was focused on the National Key Economic Areas (NKEA) to propel the country to a high-income nation by improving the economy and living standards of the people.

“Our prime minister is focused and as his deputy, I sit with him every week in various economic development meetings,” he said, adding that last year Malaysia had achieved a 7.2% growth, which not many country could claim.

Communal land titles

He also defended the BN’s record on poverty eradication, saying the BN government had made extraordinary achievements as far as reducing and eradicating poverty in the country is concerned compared to pre-independence days when the poverty rate was 98%.

In an almost election-like campaign speech at the Kampung Simpang Entilibon field here yesterday, he claimed the BN never stopped thinking about how to bring development to the people and lauded Chief Minister Musa Aman for granting communal land titles to the landless and distributing dividend payments to the hardcore poor.

“Ask any other states (in Malaysia) or in other countries if they are doing what the Sabah state government is doing… none.

“The BN government realises that the people still yearn for development,” he said.

Muhyiddin, who is also Education Minister, said he was briefed on the poor education situation in Sabah
schools.

“It was supposed to be a 20-minute briefing but it went on for more than an hour and I said last night that if it cannot be solved, then we should form a committee so that the education facilities in Sabah are not only at par with the rest of the country but are also better,” he said.