East is east and west is west, but the twain shall meet?

By Sebastian Lee

Sabah’s ties with the federal government have always been stormy and enigmatic even during the best of times. Sabahans are aggrieved by what they see as the centre’s nonchalance to their aspirations and needs after having given away a big chunk of their wealth from oil and gas and almost all of their autonomous powers to Kuala Lumpur. The centre however views them as enfants terribles pursuing parochial and egoistic goals that are not in harmony with nation building. These differences reflect the gulf in state and federal relations that is as wide as the South China Sea that separates Sabah from the Malaysian peninsula of 11 states.

At the heart of the problem is the nagging unhappiness of Sabahans over their share of national wealth, business projects, educational opportunities and government jobs. In 1976, under an act of parliament, Sabah gave Kuala Lumpur its rights to its oil and gas deposits. In return it gets 5% royalty which amounts to an annual average of 351m ringgit. In 2000-2008, the federal government paid Sabah 2.8 billion ringgit in oil royalty. Last year, Sabah received about 720m ringgit in fees after an oil bonanza saw prices hitting a record $147 a barrel. ($1 = 3.6 ringgit) At current prices of about $73 a barrel, Sabah’s average daily oil production of 200,000 barrels would earn the state about 19 billion ringgit this year if it had all the oil to itself.

Compounding their unhappiness is the statistical fact that the resource-rich state is Malaysia’s poorest. Once the second richest behind Selangor on the peninsula, Sabah has a 16% poverty rate that is almost thrice the national average. (Read Countdown to zero) The fact that the federal government has given the east Malaysian state almost 19 billion ringgit, about four times its oil royalties, for its social and economic development under the 9th five-year Malaysia plan does little to placate Sabahans. They regard it as a pittance: 8% of the national budget; notwithstanding that the state has still got eight billion ringgit to spend before the plan runs out next year. Federal funding of state projects running into billions of ringgit do compensate Sabah for its loss in oil revenue. But this seems insignificant to Sabahans suffering a sense of loss of what is rightfully theirs.

Sabahans are unhappy that west Malaysians fill most of the top posts in federal departments in their state and they rue over the loss of business opportunities to peninsular Malaysian companies in federally funded projects. These are precisely their fears that resulted in their earlier ambivalence of their participation in the creation of Malaysia in 1963. Things came to a head when two of Sabah’s federal deputy ministers of Malaysia’s dominant Malay ruling party, the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), refused new appointments after last year’s general election to protest against Kuala Lumpur’s poor treatment of their state.

Thus there were all round cheers in east Malaysia when Anifah Aman, Sabah’s outspoken lawmaker, was made foreign minister in a cabinet reshuffle that followed Najib Razak’s appointment as prime minister on April 3. Last year, Mr Anifah lambasted the federal government for not hiring enough Sabahans to fill senior posts. He said Sabahans felt that they were “being isolated” despite their state having been in Malaysia for 45 years. “Not even a Sabahan is appointed as head of a Malaysian embassy, secretary general, director-general, vice-chancellor (of a university) or chief executive of a government-linked company,” he told parliament.

Mr Anifah’s complaint is not new. Over the years, there have been rumblings in Sabah that Sabahans have lost out to other Malaysians in the federal civil service. Even chief minister Musa Aman, Mr Anifah’s elder brother, laments that there are only a few Sabahans in federal jobs because most of them prefer to work for their state government.

But there are two sides to the problem. In the early years of Malaysia, there was a dearth of qualified Sabahans for federal posts. It was this consideration that the drafters of the Malaysia agreement gave Sabah (and Sarawak), in a 20-point paper, the prerogative to retain British officers in the public service until there were qualified local people to replace them. Another right given to Sabah was the Borneanisation of the state civil service and this was to be done “as quickly as possible”.

The British expatriates have long gone. Over the last 45 years, Sabah certainly has produced many highly qualified people to staff the state and federal civil service as well as private business. But Malaysianisation of the civil service remains problematic. Kuala Lumpur says that most Sabahans are reluctant to leave their shores to take up federal posts. This problem is not only confined to the government. Private employers such as banks face similar unwillingness of Sabahans to accept job transfers to Kuala Lumpur. The main reason why Sabahans shun them is because they dislike the hustle and bustle of city life in their nation’s capital; having been accustomed to their laid-back lifestyle in their “land below the wind” where the living is good and almost everything moves in slow motion. Sabahans however ask why they have to ship out of their state to serve in Kuala Lumpur while west Malaysians are sent to Kota Kinabalu to fill top federal posts. Kuala Lumpur’s answer to such exchanges is all in the name of national integration. Unfortunately, most Sabahans do not see it that way. National integration to them is only a guise for the centre to ride roughshod over them.

Mr Anifah, who was a deputy minister for 10 years before he quit the federal government in disgust, told his fellow lawmakers that he could not accept the contention that Sabahans were not keen to serve in Kuala Lumpur. Give them important posts and they will take up the challenge. “There is no reason why Malaysians from Sabah who are qualified could not be appointed on secondment or on contract (for top posts),” he said.

Mr Anifah is right. Many years ago, Abdul Ghani Patail willingly moved to Kuala Lumpur to serve in the federal attorney-general’s chambers and he is now Malaysia’s attorney-general – the first Sabahan to hold this post.

Mr Najib has moved fast to appease Sabahans. Besides giving Mr Anifah the glamorous but important foreign portfolio, he has promoted two Sabahan politicians to powerful federal posts. Shafie Apdal moves up from the lowly but high-sounding Ministry of National Unity, Culture, Arts and Heritage to the Ministry of Rural and Regional Development while Bernard Dompok, ridiculed as the prime minister’s office boy because he did not have a portfolio, is now the minister of plantation industries and commodities. Maximus Ongkili, another senior Sabahan politician, stays as minister of science, technology and innovation. Five Sabahan lawmakers were made deputy ministers in the federal government. There were four of them in the previous administration.

And to prove that Kuala Lumpur recognises Sabahan talent, Mr Najib has appointed Andrew Sheng to the National Economic Action Council (NEAC). The council is tasked with drawing up a new economic model to help Malaysia become a high income earner and a developed country in 11 years. It will help the economic planning unit to chart Malaysia’s growth under the next five-year plan from 2011 to 2015.

Mr Sheng, 63, an old boy of Sabah College, is a chartered accountant who was the chief economist of Bank Negara, Malaysia’s central bank. He served the World Bank in Washington before he became the deputy chief executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority as well as the chairman of the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission.

Mr Najib also appointed Oh Ei Sun, a renowned Sabahan motivation trainer as his political secretary. An old boy of Kian Kok Middle school, Mr Oh, 35, speaks five languages: Malay, English, Chinese, German and French. He read law, management and engineering and he has worked for the United Nations.

It is too early to tell if Mr Najib can succeed in bringing Sabahans into the mainstream of national life. His predecessors failed not for lack of trying. Mahathir Mohamad, who was prime minister for 22 years before he retired in 2003, tried to get Sabahans to “think Malaysian” in the 1980s. But his bluntness and heavy-handedness angered Sabahans. In 1984, by a stroke of a pen, he annexed Sabah’s tiny free-port Labuan island and made it a federal territory without paying the state a single cent in return. His subsequent explanation that the centre was doing Sabah a favour by taking over the financial burden of administering Labuan did not go down well with Sabahans who still see it as Kuala Lumpur’s responsibility to help the state administration. And he courted their ire by telling them that their oil did not belong to them but to Malaysia and like Trengganu state on the peninsula, Sabah must share its oil wealth with the rest of the nation. Adding insult to injury, Dr Mahathir castigated Sabahan politicians for their free-wheeling ways and described their state as Malaysia’s “wild west” – a derogatory allusion to the 19th century American lawlessness.

Abdullah Badawi, who succeeded Dr Mahathir, did not do any better. East Malaysian representation in his expanded cabinet following his landslide electoral win in 2004 was deplorable. And having suffered a dramatic reversal of fortune at last year’s polls, he drew scorn from Sabah and Sarawak when he appointed peninsular losers to his cabinet instead of the victorious east Malaysian lawmakers. The mild-mannered Mr Abdullah’s cavalier attitude towards Sabah and Sarawak was telling. It was a shocking revelation that the prime minister was out of touch with east Malaysians. Mr Abdullah had taken them for granted; they who have saved his 13-member Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition from defeat by giving him 40% of the seats in parliament. Sabah and Sarawak lost only two seats to the opposition.

Mr Abdullah only realised his folly after his two deputy ministers from Sabah quit his team. He quickly made amends by appointing a Sabahan, Kamaruzaman Ampon, as the vice-chancellor of the University of Malaysia-Sabah (UMS) and promoted another, Yusof Saringit, as federal finance officer. Mr Kamaruzaman is the first Sabahan to become a vice-chancellor of a university.

The UMS, rather than being a boon for Sabahans seeking tertiary education in their home-state, has become their source of heartaches and broken dreams. It is a misnomer and an enigma. For years, Sabahans had clamoured for a university of their own. Their wish was fulfilled in 1994 after the BN regained control of Sabah through defections from the opposition Parti Bersatu Sabah (PBS) which had ruled the state for nine years. (The PBS has since rejoined the BN). But to their chagrin, Sabahans have found that their university is not theirs to have. The first enrolment saw an influx of west Malaysian and Sarawakian students. While the UMS student population has increased tremendously from 255 in 1995 to more than 17,000 this year, Sabahans make up less than half of the university’s admission. (Read UMS: An enigma no more, perhaps)

Education administrators are hard-pressed to explain to Sabahans that “their university” must welcome other Malaysians just as they are welcomed by universities in other states.

There does not seem to be a definitive solution to Malaysia’s east-west divide. Besides pouring billions of ringgit of federal money into Sabah for its social and economic development, Kuala Lumpur has since given the north Borneo state more control in the planning and management of federally funded projects. Sabahan companies are given priority in bidding for them.

Yet, it would be naive to think that money can buy love. It is true that much of Sabahans’ unhappiness stems from the mistaken belief that the sums do not add up in their favour. But the root of the problem is that Sabahans have never understood why Malaysia was formed. Why Sabah has to become a part of Malaysia to become independent of Britain has never been clear to them. -- Insight Sabah