Sabah poverty: EPU formula all wrong, says Sipaun
By Dominic Legeh, Free Malaysia Today
KOTA KINABALU: Sabah continues to top the list of poor states in the country because the federal government’s allocation for each state is based on the number of Malaysian citizens in each state and not the actual population.
Former Malaysian Human Rights Commission (Suhakam) vice-chairman, Simon Sipaun said the Malaysia Plan formula which was used by the Economic Planning Unit (EPU) was not feasible for Sabah because it did not take into account the thousands of illegal immigrants.
He said nine years ago when Suhakam was under the chairmanship of Musa Hitam, they had a dialogue in Kuala Lumpur which involved the relevant ministers and the EPU.
“During the meeting, I asked (the EPU) how they allocated money to all the states when formulating the Malaysia Plan.
“In the case of Sabah, I said, there are many illegal immigrants in Sabah and supposing that we have half a million illegal immigrants in Sabah, do you take into account the total number of people in Sabah when you allocate the money or not,” he recalled.
Sipaun said the answer given to him was that the EPU only took into account the actual number of Malaysians who are in Sabah.
“I told them this was not fair because if there are only one million registered Malaysian citizens in Sabah, but the overall number of people in Sabah included 500,000 illegal immigrants then when we (in Sabah) get the RM1 million allocation we have to share it among 1.5 million people.
“I also explained to them why it is not fair because the illegal immigrants still have to go to the hospitals, schools maybe, they use the roads and everything and so we (Sabahans) are actually short-changed.
“The EPU’s response was that they didn’t know the figure. I told them that it is their job to know the actual number of people (in Sabah) because if not who else would know about it.
“When I came back to Sabah later, I wrote to the (then) Sabah state secretary (KY Mustafa) to tell him that I was very surprised with what I heard (during the meeting) and I asked if he can find out what the actual situation was.
“I got a response from KY Mustafa. He said he had referred it to the state cabinet and that was all that I heard about it,” he said.
Unfair to penalise voters
About a year ago, when Sipaun was still in Suhakam, he raised the matter again at another forum.
“But, even there nobody could confirm what was the actual situation. The person who gave the talk said they based their calculations according to the needs.
“But that does not answer the question. So I think this is probably one of the factors contributing to Sabah being the poorest state in the country.
“The other contributing factors are disproportionate allocation of funds. I noticed that the government is giving so much funds to the Barisan Nasional (BN) elected representatives only.
“But the money does not belong to the BN because it actually comes from the taxpayers.
