The SALCRA Scandal – Stealing From Sarawak’s Poorest People
By Sarawak Report
Judging from his performance as Chairman of Salcra, it would be unwise to hire Deputy Chief Minister Alfred Jabu to run a fruit stall, let alone place the livelihoods of tens of thousands of families under his control.
The man has clearly squandered hundreds of millions of ringgit. Yet, as he refuses to provide even the most basic standards of accountability, no one has a clue where all that money has gone !
All one can do under such circumstances is observe that Mr Jabu himself has an extremely large house and is noted for the consipicuous wealth of his family. So, could it be that this most incompetent manager is nevertheless a highly competent thief?!
Meanwhile, the abiding shame and scandal of this BN Government is that those poor Native Customary Rights Landowners, whom they started driving into the SALCRA scheme more than 30 years ago on the pretext of rescuing them from poverty, are still scraping a living from the most miserable dividends that could possibly be imagined from the so-called business partnership run on their behalf by Mr Jabu.
Ripe for exploitation
You could not dream up a more exploitative system than the one devised by SALCRA (except of course Taib’s even more rapacious ‘Joint Venture Companies’, recently judged to be illegal and unconstitutional by the courts).
Under the programme the state government offers NCR landowners formal title to their customary lands, but only if they agree to join in the SALCRA state-run palm oil plantations.
This means they are forced to allow their land to be taken over and managed by Mr Jabu in return for their supposed ownership of it and a promised share of the proceeds. What kind of land-ownership is that?
Why no public accountability?
The landowners are given no protection from the all-powerful Mr Jabu and his BN YB colleagues on the SALCRA Board under these arrangements. Any Public Company where people can buy a few shares has by law to be rigorously audited with a publicly available Annual Report. This is to protect members of the public, who are interested in investing. Yet Jabu, although he is managing all the worldly wealth of the 20,000 thousand families who have been sucked into the SALCRA scheme, provides no public financial information at all!
What dividends there are are announced on a whim and at his own political convenience.
Jabu has now acquired over 48,000 hectares of Native Customary Rights Lands within SALCRA (most of it planted with mature palms) and he has not provided a single audit or report detailing how any of it is being managed in all the past 35 years. Needless to say the landowners themselves have no representation on the Board or within Management or any way of gaining any information whatsoever about the finances of the business in which they are supposed to be partners.
