Sarawak Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud, in power for three decades, is now saying that he’s willing to retire after having long overstayed his welcome. But there are big BUTs and Ifs… For one, he sees no reason why he alone should be kicked out. Evidently, he wants his deputy, Alfred Jabu Anak Numpang, to suffer the same fate as well.
For another, the problem is that there are no qualified persons to take their place. Otherwise, apparently both of them would leave right away. Now, we have heard it all from Taib!
Taib’s reference to Jabu’s fate being tied up with his own is interesting in more ways than one.
So far, the talk generated by Taib’s predecessor and uncle, Abdul Rahman Ya’kub, is that Jabu would take over as interim chief minister if and when Taib goes. As the story goes, Rahman’s daughter and Taib’s cousin Norah Abdul Rahman, the Tanjung Manis MP, would then take over from Jabu before he gets too big for his boots, forgets his roots and bites the hand that feeds him.
Now, judging from Taib’s remarks in Betong, there’s no chance of Jabu being Sarawak chief minister for even a day. This was the same fate suffered by former Deputy Prime Minister Ghafar Baba when his boss Mahathir Mohamad, in cahoots with Anwar Ibrahim, had him kicked out from the Umno deputy presidency. Anwar, in turn, suffered an even worse fate than Ghafar at the hands of the Machiavellian Mahathir.
Jabu’s face reportedly turned ashen when he heard Taib mention him at a community leader’s seminar in Betong on Friday. Jabu is MP for Betong and state assemblyman for Layar.
Taib was in fact telling the Iban leaders gathered in Betong that Jabu was not qualified to take over from him. In fact, no one is qualified to take over from Taib, according to him, and that is his biggest “dilemma”. The question that can be raised is why Jabu, along with George Chan, remain Taib’s deputies if they are not qualified to step into his shoes.
Already, as a sort of insurance, Parti Rakyat Sarawak (PRS) deputy information chief Tedewin Ngumbang Datu has resigned from the BN component party in recent days to take on Jabu in Layar and Betong. There’s little doubt that Taib’s Pesaka Bumiputera Bersatu (PBB), the Taib-Rahman family in particular, is behind Ngumbang in a bid to finish off Jabu once and for all.
This brings us to Taib’s question of who can best bring development to Sarawak. Development, in Taib’s view, is the most important aspect of running Sarawak and therefore it follows that anyone who cannot bring development to Sarawak – obviously, as he “has done” – does not qualify to be chief minister of Sarawak.
Cookie jar
Patently, it’s a good thing that Taib has brought up the issue of development. For years, he flogged the “politics of development” theme. He no longer does that in the wake of sizzling revelations about how much his family and his cronies have salted away over the years just by putting their hands in the cookie jar.
Still, Taib has the temerity to talk about the dire under-development of Sarawak. Had he been competent enough as the chief minister, Sarawak wouldn’t be listed by the World Bank as the second poorest state in Malaysia after neighbouring Sabah. Even Terengganu and Kelantan, the two other poverty-stricken states in Malaysia, are much better off than Sabah and Sarawak.
The little development that has taken place in Sarawak has been almost wholly unsustainable, that is, at the expense of Mother Nature and future generations. The state’s public debt is at a record high and among the largest in Malaysia. It’s okay to have a large public debt if it was incurred in the process of bringing about the kind of socio-economic changes which will help underwrite the huge loans being raised by the state from time to time. That doesn’t seem to have been the case.
Taib, in fact, has reduced Sarawak to a beggar state and a state of beggars which will forever be dependent on federal handouts and thereby unable to seek self-determination. The nightmare scenario in Putrajaya is that the people of both Sabah and Sarawak would make comparisons with Singapore which left Malaysia in 1965 and Brunei which stayed out of the federation at the 11th hour. Any such comparison would plant the seeds of separatism and eventually result in the two states opting out from Malaysia.
Now, thanks to Taib, there’s no danger of that happening since Sarawak’s poverty-stricken status remains a guarantee against the state seeking independence.
Pot of gold
Taib is painting visions of development being brought by the energy-intensive SCORE region in Sarawak. In short, it’s the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, if not El Dorado itself.
This is the kind of development talk that the Dayaks, the Ibans in particular, don’t want to hear. They fear that the creation of the proposed one million jobs in the economic corridor would simply see the influx of foreigners who cannot integrate into society and would cause endless social problems as they have done in Sabah. In Sabah, the influx of 1.7 million foreigners – most of them illegal immigrants – have resulted in the marginalisation and disenfranchisement of the 1.5 million Sabahans.
Is this Taib’s last hurrah? Does SCORE offer the prospects of sowing the seeds of marginalisation and disenfranchisement in Sarawak before he decides to call it a day? If so, he has a racist and hidden agenda in refusing to let go after 30-odd years in public office.
Already, the Dayaks have suffered enormously under his regime and they continue to do so. His government considers the great majority of the native customary rights (NCR) lands as state lands unless proven otherwise in court. This has meant a case-by-case uphill battle in the courts for natives whose lands have been seized by the state government under one pretext or another and handed over to crony-run plantation companies for oil palm development. This is nothing less than naked abuse of power, if not exercising absolute power.
Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Yet the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) plays the role of the proverbial three monkeys when it comes to Taib, that is, see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil.
Taib has a licence from Putrajaya to do as he pleases in Sarawak as long as he delivers the majority of the 31 parliamentary seats in the state to the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN), keep the Dayak majority down as hewers of wood and drawers of water for others and keeps the state securely within the Federation of Malaysia.
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