After reading “Just Where Is The Fairness For Sabah” by Datuk John Lo, published in this paper last May, I feel again my own heartbreak and deep frustration as I am reminded of the injustices committed by the state and federal government against the people of Sabah.
John Lo is right in saying it’s not a matter of “something is wrong but that everything is not right.” The lack of sufficient funding to bring the people out of poverty is most heart-wrenching when witnessed at the ground level in many remote places in Sabah.
And the pain is even more excruciating when we remember that we have been in Malaysia for more than half a century.
If one were to see how the poor people in the villages suffer in their struggle to live, how in their unhygienic condition go about eating and drinking, how they do without the basic necessities such as running water and electricity, how they accept their fate of having to die with treatable diseases because the hospitals are too very far away (and that the arduous journey to see a doctor would kill them faster), one would cry and realize fully that Malaysia has failed Sabah through a terrible neglect. One would feel a sense that the people have been abandoned in no man’s land, forsaken and forgotten.
ADVERTISEMENT
Yes, it’s true that eight-year old pupils in the Marudu Peninsula have to walk nine hours to go back to their villages for the school holidays. Yes, it’s true that many primary school pupils have to traverse the jungle barefooted with bottle kerosene lamps at 4am to go to school.
The story of a Kiulu boy committing suicide to lessen the burden of his single mother and after being mocked for eating porridge with kangkung, and the case of a girl dying after falling through a hole in a hanging bridge in Tongod last July are now forgotten. During the 1980s, a politician in Pitas admitted that most of the villagers there ate only once or twice a day – not rice but tapioca.
Articles in the Internet document how people in the interior of Kinabatangan and Paitan live in such dilapidated houses that seem ready to collapse. Such sights shock any visitors from the cities but their local YBs have forgotten them.
Houses occupied by PTIs (illegal immigrants) are in a lot better condition. Most Interior houses don’t even have RM10 in the whole house. But these are not the only tragedies. The realities of sad and heartbreaking human conditions in the forgotten villages are countless and unending.
The tragic unrealised reality is that because they are so remote they are forgotten, even by their own YBs.
ADVERTISEMENT
YBs nowadays are mostly YBs for the money. Their aim is to make money as much as possible before they retire and become ex-YBs.
The people’s problems are to them not important, with the belief that not much can be done for them; that no matter how much you worry they will still be the way they are.After all what can you do if the government doesn’t give development allocation?
And how does the Federal Government see the whole thing? The same way they look the cases of rotting school buildings in Sabah; the same way they look upon the sufferings of the Orang Aslis in the peninsula.
There is clearly a case of compassion fatigue in Putrajaya where other pressing government administrative problems get bigger by the day. No wonder the call for secession by some quarters have been heard.