Time for Sabah politicians to live up to promises amid water crisis
Taps in the ailing Malaysian state were always going to dry up with officials shifting blame instead of fixing long-standing supply issues
It has been nearly two months since taps ran dry for as many as 150,000 residents of the semirural district of Papar in Sabah on Malaysian Borneo. as an El Nino-induced drought forced the shutdown of a major water treatment facility due to a shortfall in usable raw water.
The facility along the Papar River – a key source of raw water for the district – had to be shut down in mid-February as low river levels allowed seawater to travel 13km upstream to where the plant was located and contaminate the raw water supply.
The response from the authorities was a mixed bag.
In early March, Deputy Chief Minister Shahelmey Yahya dismissed claims of a water crisis, telling reporters it was only a “shortage” caused by climate change and delays in water-related projects.
Just days later, local authorities declared a drought emergency and mobilised an army of trucks carrying water tanks to send water to the main town and dozens of villages in the vast district nearly twice the size of Singapore, while the government scrambled to restore supply.
If one were to do a quick scan of news headlines on water supply in Sabah over the past few years, it would show this was a crisis waiting to happen.
Total water reserve margins in Sabah state fell to just 7 per cent in the middle of last year as El Nino set in.
The situation was exacerbated by increasing urban water usage, leakages from decrepit infrastructure and illegal tapping – a claim made by the state government – by squatter colonies that house hundreds of thousands of economic migrants from neighbouring Indonesia and the Philippines.
It is a long-standing problem, with successive state administrations pointing the finger at their predecessors for failing to do their jobs and accusing rivals of alleged corruption in their handling of hundreds of millions of ringgit in past fund allocations meant to solve Sabah’s water issues.
The current state government had said that climate change could trigger future crises if nothing was done to fix Sabah’s ailing water infrastructure.
But this was just lip service for residents who have had to deal with regular water rationing long before the current crisis.
The affected water treatment plant along the Papar River, which the district’s MP said earlier this week was back in operation, was supposed to serve as an emergency facility to back up the primary plant further upstream.
Instead, the emergency plant became the primary supplier for areas within its serviceable radius, due to low output from the main facility.
The situation is symptomatic of deep disparities in access to basic infrastructure between urban and rural areas in Malaysia’s second-largest state.
The UN said in January that only 80.5 per cent of Sabah’s estimated population of 3.6 million had access to safely managed drinking water, compared with the national average of 95 per cent. The rate was just 61 per cent in some rural areas in Sabah.
The effects of increasingly frequent adverse weather events are not limited to Sabah. The current heatwave has so far killed one person in Pahang state in Malaysia’s peninsula.
Malaysia and Singapore saw the return of haze last year, with both countries pinning the cause on forest fires in Indonesia.
But blaming the weather will do nothing to help better the lot of millions of people still bereft of access to basic amenities such as potable water and stable electricity supply more than six decades after Sabah helped form the Malaysian federation.
Earlier this year, the federal government approved 400 million ringgit in total allocations to manage Sabah’s perennial water issues.
The time for finger-pointing is over. It is time for Sabah’s politicians to show and tell.
Blaming the weather will do nothing to help better the lot of millions of people still bereft of access to basic amenities such as potable water and stable electricity