It might be true for all Sabahan parties should sit together and put aside their political differences to resolve the issues pertaining to Sabah’s 20 point memorandum and Malaysia Agreement 1963. However, without good governance based on principle of CAT, Competence, Accountability and Transparency, the more devolution of power to state might comes with more power corruption in the state, as the famous quotation of Lord Acton says, “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”.
I welcome the initiative of Foreign Minister Datuk Seri Aniyah Aman to conduct a forum with the theme of “The Agreement to Formation of Malaysia 1963” in University Malaysia Sabah last Saturday, featuring 12 panellists from different background, background, from lawyer associated with UMNO (Shafee Abdullah) to Borneo Nationalist (Yong Teck Lee, Jeffrey Kitingan and Zainnal Ajamain).
The most concrete outcome of the forum is, a constitutional safeguard that guarantees Sabah 40% of net revenue earned by the Federal Government from the state became the centre of discussion at the forum on state rights. The revenue is substantial.
For instance, Sabah can earn extra RM480 million per annum in its revenue with the new federal Goods and Services Tax (GST) enforcement started this April, as Sabah Royal Customs Department is targeting to collect RM1.2 billion from it.
A lot more revenues we can take from federal government. From oil and gas industry, palm oil industry, tourism industry, property industry etc, if 40% of it’s net revenue earned by the federal government from the state, going back to the state’s coffer.
However, huge additional revenue is meaningless if corruption is rampant in the state which cause wastage and leakages of the fund and eventually people on the ground can’t feel the joy brought by the substantial revenue.
Just take timber industry as example. Federal government has no control on the timber royalty, it’s solely under state jurisdiction. But yet the timber industry is tainted with so many corruption allegations. Even Anifah Aman he himself is reported by Sarawak Report that obtaining timber licences worth RM400 millions from his brother Sabah Chief Minister Datuk Seri Musa Aman few years ago.
Furthermore, it is reported that the timber royalty in the state has been dropping drastically over 60% from RM465 million in 2005 to RM173 million in 2012. Forestry Director Datuk Sam Manan justified the drop with the statistics of the least logging activity in history. But how much actually is Sabah’s illegal logging losses?
Decentralisation of power must come along with democratisation. DAP Sabah has no problem to put aside political differences to fight for Sabah’s rights, but we have reservations over how the state being governed so far. There is no open tender practiced in awarding out development projects. There is no transparency of timber licenses awarding. There is no competence shown by government in delivering projects, end up with a lot of failures or unfinished works. The most important thing is, no one taken task to be accountable for those wastages, leakages and failures.
Taking back the state special rights is not enough. We need to have good governance to encompass the development of the state to ensure that all the allocations are used in the correct manner.