Where is the promised KDM college? - Dr Jeffrey

KOTA KINABALU - “Where is the KDM College that was promised by the BN government in the run-up to GE-13?” asked Datuk Dr. Jeffrey Kitingan, STAR Sabah Chief, in a written statement released to the media.

Now that the State Kamaatan festivities have ended and the National Kamaatan cancelled, the relevant parties should start working on getting the KDM College built unless of course the previous announcements and ground-breaking ceremony were nothing more than a political gimmick for GE-13.

The Sabah natives community in particular the KDM were promised a KDM College as part of the BN campaign to entice the KDM voters in GE-13. The Project was announced in May 2011 with endorsements by the federal Education Ministry, CM Musa, the Huguan Siou and many others.

On 16 June 2012, PM Najib came and did a grand ground breaking ceremony at the proposed College site in Tambunan and officially launched the KDM College with great fanfare.

Alas, 3 years have lapsed since the ground breaking and almost everyone is in the dark about the building of the KDM College and both the federal and Sabah governments have remained inelegantly silent adding to the rumours that the KDM College was never approved officially.

From insider sources, when the ground breaking was officiated, there was no official confirmation of the said College from the then Ministry of Higher Education, it was purely an announcement from the PM himself. Since then, the Ministry of Higher Education has been disbanded by Najib himself and whatever plans, if any, to build the College appeared to have been put into cold storage it seems.

For the sake of the future of Sabahans, the Sabah government should emulate their Sarawak counterparts and build more technical and vocational institutes and colleges and upgrade existing ones to enhance the technical skills of Sabahans. The KDM College would be one of them. If the KDM College is not built, it will be a blow to the future of Sabahans who are already languishing behind the others.

At the same time, the Sabah government should seriously review and re-assess the education policy and administration in Sabah with the re-establishment of Sabah’s own Ministry of Education and a vision towards building towering Sabahans that will drive the growth of Sabah into a developed nation status. This is more so now that the Chief Minister of Sarawak has asked the federal government to devolve the power over education to the Sarawak government and PM Najib has agreed to this.