EQUAL RIGHTS AND MUTUAL RESPECT

Sabah and Sarawak want fair deal from the federation

WILL the Bill to amend Article 1(2) of the Federal Constitution, expected to be tabled this coming week, pass in Parliament?

Constitutional amendments require a two-thirds majority in Parliament, something the current Pakatan Harapan (PH) national government does not have.

It either needs the support of the 19 Gabungan Parti Sarawak (GPS) members of parliament or the official parliamentary opposition to carry the amendment.

The proposed amendment came about after an earlier amendment in 1976 which purportedly reduced Sabah and Sarawak to merely two states instead of being two administratively distinct territories which together with Malaya and Singapore, formed the expanded Malaysian federation in 1963 as “equal partners”.

What is closer to the truth may be that the 1976 amendment only regularised the accepted fact.

It will be noted that back then, the amendment passed with the support of Sabah and Sarawak MPs who were mostly with the Barisan Nasional administration.

If there had been disquiet among them (the then incumbent MP for Bintulu, Ting Ling Kiew, now says he was one who objected and absented himself when

the vote came up), it was muted and barely spilled into public discourse.

So what changed between 1976 and now is that the popular disquiet in the two Borneo states has led to the current national government seeking to restore the constitutional order to status quo.

The best guess will be that Putrajaya today realises the popular disquiet across the South China Sea is quite real, for any number of reasons – some perhaps conflicting or contradictory and therefore perhaps a bit unrealistic.

But something must be done, goes this line of thinking, and since there is this clamour to restore the constitution pertaining to the status of Sabah and Sarawak to that prior to 1976, that clamour will be acceded to.

But if, as the Sarawak state administration seems to have belatedly realised, such an exercise brings little practical effect, why clamour for it in the first place?

I think it speaks to a general confusion on the part of some state leaders.

The public is ill-served by a profusion of conflicting demands placed by such leaders and a somewhat haphazard and perhaps premature announcements on new state initiatives with farreaching implications such as the formation of Petros, the new state-owned oil-and-gas entity, and a sales tax on the same industry.

What seems clear in spite of all the conflicting pronouncements though is a general public sense in both Sabah and Sarawak that the people in both states have not gotten a fair deal out of federation.

It will be a challenge for all concerned to find ways to address such a perception.

Putrajaya, despite the confusion and some duplicity emanating out of Sabah and Sarawak, will be well-advised not to attempt moves that will be interpreted as cynical and thereby stirring perhaps even greater troubles further down the road.

But what exactly can the federal administration do? It needs, above all, to recognise that a general clamour for both these states to fully run their own affairs is a legitimate and reasonable desire.

It therefore has to find meaningful ways to further devolve powers currently exercised by the federal government to both states, where possible and feasible.

This will naturally mean that expenditures usually disbursed by federal departments and ministries will now be channelled directly to the Sabah and Sarawak governments instead of via block grants, bearing in mind that a frustration given voice by the late Sarawak Chief Minister Tan Sri Adenan Satem about the state being merely one of 12 other supplicants for federal funds resonates far and wide, even today.

Although it is quite impossible for Putrajaya to accede to demands that development funds be apportioned on the basis that Sabah and Sarawak are two of three “territories” within federation without considering that population-wise, both states together constitute not even a third of the entire national population, creative ways can surely be found to give emphasis for these two states to catch up with developments in the peninsula.

Both states deserve a “new deal” within the federation.

The federal government needs to go on the offensive in educating the people in Sabah and Sarawak about the “hidden” costs borne entirely by Putrajaya in defending the territorial integrity of the two states with their long land and maritime international boundaries – not just in military personnel and hardware terms but through international diplomacy.

The writer views developments in the nation, the region and the wider world from his vantage point in Kuching, Sarawak