From the eighth Malaysia Plan to tenth Malaysia Plan, Sabah is among the states that received highest allocation for the infrastructure development, it was nearly RM11.115 billion. But, the people of Malaysia were shocked when Sabah only achieved 3% on its economic growth during the time when Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib announced the 11th Malaysia Plan. It was not a proud figure for it only reached 50% of the national average economic growth which recorded at 6%. It needs a period of 10 to 20 years to catch up with the national’s.
Therefore, the question that I want to point out is whether the allocation for those development projects under the Malaysia Plan can be utilised well? Because the reality is Sabah continue to lag behind in its infrastructure and basic facilities development, furthermore there are still many project in 11th Malaysia Plan that not fulfilled yet. There are still many questionable development projects such as Tawau Coast Highway, Pan Borneo Highway, Cinta Mata dam project and abandoned school SMK Titingan 2 in Tawau.
I believe that, the economic growth of Sabah did not go up albeit the government allocated a huge amount of money because of weak governance and corruptions. The extraordinary phenomenon of corruptions led to the economic recession in Sabah and slows down the development of Sabah.
MACC should undertake fair and professional actions against all parties that suspicious in the involvement of corruptions. Recently, MACC has successfully track and detected some illegal logging syndicates, and also confiscated a total of 1,785 timbers that worth a million Ringgit in Sarawak in the operation codenamed as “Ops Gergaji”.
The MACC also freeze accounts of 700 million Ringgit. So I would like to urge MACC to take the similar action in Sabah.
In Sabah, I received many complaints about the delay in giving approval for development projects like housing project. When the project delayed, it will cause the price hike. According to the Chairman of Sabah Housing and Real Estate Developers Association (SHAREDA), the delay of approval has caused the price of low cost house increase 10% just because the developers force to bear the high operation cost. This is not only burdening the developers but also the buyers.
Today, when we apply for international passport, it is only take a very short time. The approval of passport, few decades ago, took around one year but now, it just took one day or even only one hour. So why some approval of project needs to take as long as five years? I received a lot of complaints from many developers and some of them came from Peninsular. They do not dare to file an official complaint since they worried this will bring negative impact to their business.
I suggest the government to form a One Stop Centre through the Minister of Housing and local government, and draft a time frame of at least one year for the approval of development projects.
The corruptions that occurred from top to bottom has forced the people to bear the burden of price hike. In order to solve this matter, MACC has to take strict actions in investigation no matter it is small “anchovy” or big “sharks”.