I urge the visiting Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak, to intervene in solving on-going excessive and questionable logging activities in Tawau areas.
Najib should especially pay attention to issues raised over uncontrolled timber fellings around Tawau, including in what many locals had claimed to be right within the Andrassy First Class Forest Reserve near here which also hosts Tawau water catchment areas.
Even a local UMNO leader from Tawau, Amissain Latip, had in August last year urged the Prime Minister to intervene in the case as all complaints seem to fall on deaf ears,” Chan said in a statement here on the eve of Najib’s brief visit to Tawau tomorrow.
Don’t just come here for a quick UMNO solidarity event and fly back to Putrajaya without listening to people’s grouses. This issue of questionable logging, in some cases a so-called timber felling to clear the site for a ever-slow geothermal power generation project at Apas Kiri.
The supposedly high-impact geothermal project, which was supposedly to generate 35megawatts of power when completed next year, was directly under Najib, both as Prime Minister and Finance Minister, by virtue of the project being part of his ambitious Economic Transformation Project (ETP).
There are various issues tied to logging activities in Tawau and that many among the rakyat have questioned why is timber felling continues to be very robust while very little progress was made on the geothermal project itself, oftentimes cited as a reason for clearing parts of the First Class Forest.
This geothermal project, also called Tawau Green Energy (TGE) project, received RM35 million grant from the Prime Minister’s Department’s Private-Public Co-operation Unit, is also allegedly well behind time whereas timber felling continues unabated. What is the meaning of all this?
I urge the authorities concerned or independent parties to carry out immediate audit of the whole issues at hand as it appeared certain parties took advantage of loopholes in clearing the site for the TGE project.
In the recent Sabah state assembly sitting i brought up this issue and even suggested to the State Government to suspend the Director of the state Forestry Department to pave for an official investigation on possible power-abuses in the logging sector.
The State Government as usual just pledged “monitoring of the case” was being carried out, when nothing decisive was done to correct wrongs and stop all this excessive questionable logging, While timber-felling goes on aggressively, the geothermal itself is only 35% completed by September last year.
Next year is coming up fast, but where is the first geothermal well costing USD6 million? There was no update on the firm’s website since October 2014. We do not want to see the project to become a “white elephant”. There were even allegations that payments for timber brought out from the areas did not tally with the total cubic metre involved.
A lot of issues have cropped up in relation to the geothermal project and forest clearing works, and the last thing we want is leaving Tawau prone to flash floods like in recent Kelantan as sediments in the Tawau River reportedly to have risen considerably lately.