We can’t promise a future if we have destroyed the past. We can’t promise a future because we haven’t delivered a past.Taib Mahmud and his administration haven’t got a past to model from. What past can we speak of? We can of courses speak of the prosperity of the elite vs. the misery of the people. We can tell the people all about the wealth accumulated by Taib and his family aboard. We can justify the extent of the wealth as being due to spectacular business acumen. But that would be met by widespread scepticism and even disdain.
We can expose the massive land grab that is happening under Taib’s watch over his ward. That too is permissible because Taib has done so much for Sarawak people. After all, this is the age of ‘give me your trust’ reminiscent of the `ask not what the government can do for you’ paternalistic approach of leading people, famously intoned by John Kennedy.
We certainly can speak of luxury and decadent living with caviar and wines on-board luxury yachts, of mansions and so forth in comparison with primitively appointed long houses and probably drinking contaminated tuak. We haven’t delivered electricity and water to the people in the long houses. You haven’t been humbled until you see the dayak having to walk miles to get a can of kerosene. He can’t take a bus for that would mean having less to pay for the kero.
We can speak too of the spectacle and the fuss we make when dignitaries graced longhouses bringing with them cigarettes and beer and have the public marvelling and gawking at the ngajat dances performed. We then proclaim, we revere the dayak’s past. That is about all we can say of the past. If we have an impoverished past, can we speak of a prospering future? Why should the dayaks even humor such promises?
All these in line with — let us keep them poor and humbled so that they vote BN each time.
How do we justify the continuation of a government such as this? We can do so by asking the people not to believe in these incredible stories. you can say with the poker face of yours, these are fabricated and embellished tales by some foreigners who have different values. Incidentally that is the storyline carried by some writers. The land grab issue? Oh… just some overblown narrations by a misplaced western idealist by the name of Clare Brown. The Sarawak Radio? Just an outfit run by a dayak operating somewhere in London with Clare Brown or from Jakarta.
Yes, Sarawak is indeed taken over by foreigners. It’s taken over by the Lebanese. Sarawak is a haven compared to war torn Lebanon. You can let your hair and everything else down here. Soon, the Geneids will take over Sarawak. The uncle marries the sister of Taib, Taib marries the niece of the uncle. It’s a real live remake of P Ramlee’s anak bapak.
How can a decent government treat its people like this? You have 6000 long houses without amenities. You take away the most important thing to the dayak — his land on which every morning he touches with his bare hands, prostrates and pays homage to mother earth conscious all the time, that mother earth provides him with his sustenance? Take away that land and you take away his very life.
You have had 30 years to carry out your promises. You can’t even fulfill basic needs to 6000 long house dwellers. You can’t promise a better future to the 20,000 participants of the 48,000 hectares NCR land managed by Salcra.
The promises made to people of Batang Ai haven’t been fulfilled and Taib Mahmud wants to make more. The people of Sarawak are saying, it’s time for other people to make the promises. Things can’t be worse that what it is now.
One commentator has repeatedly ask- he doesn’t care about these exposures because everyone knows about it and knowing about them doesn’t reduce the price of things he buys. This stupid person is admitting a number of things about his character.
He thinks the phrase everyone knows will encourage readers to dismiss or trivialize the subject matter of an article such as this. There are numerous other articles on Sarawak written by more qualified writers than I. I am sure if this stupid and arrogant person reads those, he will say the same thing- everyone knows about them. Well, the fact of the matter, everyone doesn’t know about them. Even if some people know about them, these stories about abuse of power, corruption, pillage and plunder must be retold very now and then. Because, the level of people’s frustration and revulsion to these things must be heightened to effect the change.
Before making more promises for the future, Taib’s government explain their past promises first. According to many blogs by Sarawakians-
At the long houses of Wong Pandak and Wong Panjai the people are still forced to gather their water from the rain off their roofs. Likewise, children at the boarding school of Naga Kesit have no running water to drink and at the Scheme 1 and Scheme 2 longhouses at Sebelaiu there is no water to bath in because the erosion from the palm plantations have clogged up their streams. Currently, even the clinic at the main town of Lubok Antu is without water! The people of the area say that as often as not they are forced to wash themselves in ditches.
Umno and BN have a choice really. Stand on the side of the oppressor or the oppressed. —
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