KOTA KINABALU: Poverty in resource-rich Sabah is proving harder to eradicate than the government departments and agencies at both state and federal level are willing to admit.
The Umno-led Barisan Nasional coalition government has been trying to tackle the problem in the state for decades but with little success as proven by the federal Economic Planning Unit (EPU) report and yesterday’s United Nation Children’s Fund (Unicef) Report, said Bingkor assemblyman Jeffrey Kitingan.
Kitingan said it is time for the government to stop hiding from the truth and establish a bi-partisan select committee in the state legislative assembly to formulate a new and comprehensive plan to resolve poverty problems in Sabah once and for all.
He said the Sabah government should invite people from across the political divide to help formulate a new poverty eradication plan as well as oversee the programmes drawn up.
Kitingan was responding to the news report on a statistical profile by Unicef on Malaysian children, which showed Sabah and Kelantan recorded the highest number of poor and undernourished children.
The profile which was released yesterday showed that Sabah and Kelantan topped the chart in the percentage of children living in poverty at 31% and 15% respectively.
The proportion is in contrast with the national statistic, which stood at 9%.
The contrast was even greater when compared to poverty levels in states like Selangor, Negeri Sembilan and Johor which registered just 2%-4% of children needing help.
“It is extraordinarily high compared to the national average of 9% and more than double that of the next highest Kelantan at 15% with Selangor performing the best with 2%,” Kitingan pointed out.
The Unicef report, he said, should be regarded as a SOS signal to the government and noted that neither the BN parties nor individual BN leader had responded to it.
“Where is the chest-thumping, boasting ministers and the government … (they were once) telling how well they have been doing to tackle poverty in Sabah and reeling off statistics to support their chest-thumping,” he said.
“This deafening silence does not augur well for children in Sabah. Lest we forget, in the recent past, a child student committed suicide because of the problems faced by his family’s poverty,” he added.
Chronic poverty in Sabah
Kitingan, who is also Sabah STAR chairman, stressed that the ruling government must stop using poverty in the state as a way to achieve their political goals.
He pointed out that the Unicef Report is the second such document following the Prime Minister’s Department’s own EPU report that revealed that the poverty levels are chronic in Sabah with 53.5% in the abject poor household category residing in the state while 39.3% were in the poor household category.
In neighbouring Sarawak, the figure was 11.4% and 11.7% respectively.
The two reports, Kitingan said, only re-affirmed the actual situation concerning poverty in Sabah. a fact which the ruling Umno-led BN government and their leaders continue to deny.
“Saying that we have reduced poverty from such and such a percentage to a lower percentage does not detract from the fact that poverty is still chronic in Sabah.
“The Sabah government and its ministers should now accept their failures in tackling the poverty problem in Sabah and face the problem head-on.
“They should not wait for another child to commit suicide before taking action.
“The governments and ministers right down to the people in Sabah need to shed their easy-to-please mentality and look at problems in the eye and not be deflected by cheap publicity, self-praise and self-serving reports,” said Kitingan.
SAIDI should be zero
On a separate issue, Kitingan also took a swipe at the Sabah Electricity Sdn Bhd (SESB) for boasting recently of the improvement in continuous power supply to consumers compared to previous years.
“Whatever the reasons, the SAIDI (System Average Interruption Duration Index) should be zero and complaints on electricity disruptions should be zero,” he said, adding that the utilities claim that it had received 23,747 complaints was nothing to boast about.
He said this was an example of how Sabahans and Malaysian need to change their mindset and not accept blindly what the authorities tell them.
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