By SINDIN RANGGANGON,
PKR Tuaran Information Chief
THE announcement by the Prime Minister that Sabah is no longer the poorest state
gives us no comfort at all. It doesn’t make sense that all of a sudden poverty
has been reduced after the situation has been around for decades. In a single
visit by the PM, which was supposed to be “the last visit to Sabah before the
general election,” poor households have gone down from 30,000 to 7,000. And we
are not told when this reduction happened, and what has caused it to happen. If
there was a sudden economic miracle to make poverty disappear in 23,000
households, how come we never heard about it?
I guess we can’t really blame the PM for
having to come up with this kind of stunt. If the state Umno/BN couldn’t solve
the poverty problem then the only way to go about is to deny the poverty and at
least give some comfort to the people. At least the BN leaders will now have
some capital to use to deny the opposition’s propaganda that Sabah, according
to the World Bank, is the poorest state, and that 40 percent of all poor people
in Malaysia are in Sabah!
I don’t have all the statistics, but as a
Sabahan I know it in my blood that, here, poverty is everywhere – in the
cities, towns and worst of all in the villages. I can speak for my own area,
Kiulu, which is still very much undeveloped after half a century of
independence. Around 60 villages still don’t have roads, so people living in
these kampungs have to walk or take bamboo rafts to get to the nearest roads.
In many places they can’t even do that because when the water of river is high
they can’t cross by wading through because there are no hanging bridges.
If any BN leaders can really spend his or
her time by going to the remote villages in many parts of Sabah, they will see
that the people are malnourished. They may be happy, working and going about
actively, but if you look at them, you would notice they have aged beyond their
years. Many of them who look like they are in their 60s are actually only in
their 40s. They have grown up and brought up their families working the hills
with their bones and muscles without much complaint. Too many of them live in
dilapidated wooden and bamboo houses, and often there is not even ten ringgits
in the whole house. The have food all the time because they live off the land
where they have planted some cash crops and orchards but they donp;t get the
right nutrition. What they get is also far from being sufficient for them to
rise above the poverty line, which is RM866 for an urban household. I would put
the average income of households in the remote villages to be about RM100.
In 2010 Datuk Seri Sharizat Abdul Jalil had
said in Sabah that besides 44,643 hardcore poor families in the state, and that
there were another 55,957 families categorized as "poor" and a
further 86,399 families categorised as "mudah miskin" (borderline
poor). And she pledged that poverty in Sabah would be eradicated by the end of
that year. So when the PM came here a few days ago he indirectly admitted the
BN failed to eradicate poverty in the state because there were will 7,000 poor
households.
Whatever figures the BN give to us about
poverty is no longer believable because the statements of various leaders are
different from each other, so we know what they are saying are only for
political propaganda and have no bearing on the truth. They have this habit of
trying to make poverty go away like magic by saying it is not there.
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