By DayakDaily Team
KUCHING, Aug 29: Sarawak Senator Robert Lau has stressed that any royal commission of inquiry (RCI) should begin at the very top “where wastages and scandals are aplenty” and not single out Sarawak, in response to former law minister Datuk Zaid Ibrahim’s suggestion that the State’s leadership also be scrutinised.
While welcoming Zaid’s support for a royal commission on how Petroliam Nasional Berhad (PETRONAS) wealth was used and how to improve transparency and fairness in resource distribution with states, including Sarawak, Lau viewed Zaid’s call to extend the scope to Sarawak’s governance as “a veiled attack” that distracts from the real issue.
“It’s a conditional support clothed with a veiled attack on the way Sarawak was governed with the suggestion of expanding the proposed Royal Commission’s scope to include how power and the wealth of Sarawak was used.
“Why Sarawak only; why not start from the very top where wastages and scandals are plenty? This is an attempt to distract from the real issue,” he said in a statement today.
Lau emphasised that the central issue is not about pointing fingers at Sarawak, but how Malaysia as a nation can transform its economy and reduce over-reliance on natural resources, particularly those extracted from Sarawak and Sabah, to address the country’s dire financial position.
“The nation faces a huge public debt of more than RM1.3 trillion and an annual budget deficit, adding nearly RM100 billion yearly to this debt until we can achieve balanced budget. The scary part is there is no clear view of when the nation will achieve a balance budget again,” he cautioned.
While stressing that he does not condone abuse of power at any level, Lau said the long-standing dissatisfaction of Sarawak and Sabah must not be ignored, particularly over how the federal government seized control of oil and gas resources.
“We cannot close our eyes to the dissatisfaction and unfairness felt by the people of Sarawak and Sabah towards the issue of her natural resources being taken by the federal government in underhanded method, including misusing the emergency powers given to quell race riots in Kuala Lumpur by issuing executive orders to alter the shorelines of Sarawak and Sabah so as to get hold of the oil and gas wealth,” he said.
He reminded that the formation of Malaysia on Sept 16, 1963, was meant to accelerate the development of Sarawak and Sabah, not to facilitate a “resources grab.”
“It should not be like what happened to Malaya by the British during the British colonial rule by taking all the tin and rubber wealth to support their economy and that of the British Empire,” he said.
To illustrate, Lau quoted from the book “British Malaya – An Economic Analysis”, published in 1955 and republished locally in 1982, which described Malaya as Britain’s “dollar arsenal” due to its massive rubber exports, warning against history repeating itself under federal control.
He cited that in 1951, the rubber export from Malaya to the United States was estimated at 370,000 tonnes, valued at about US$405,000,000 (US$405 million), while Britain’s total export to the United States were valued at less than US$400,000,000 (US$400 million).
“Sarawak was fortunate not to suffer the fate of Malaya where almost all her wealth in tin and rubber, the two pillars of Malaya economy, were taken to support the British economy and her empire. The British government had only 16 years to rule Sarawak (from 1946 until Sept 16, 1963). Hence, she did not have the time to take the wealth away from Sarawak,” he said.
Lau concluded that the real challenge now is for Malaysia to undergo a paradigm shift in its economy, allowing states like Sarawak to utilise their natural resources for their own development rather than being siphoned off to the federal centre.
“It does not serve any purpose to point fingers or to distract from the real issues at hand. The real challenge is whether the nation’s economy can transform, to have a paradigm shift, so that it does not need to rely on natural resources from states to drive it. Let the states use their own natural resources found on the land for their own development,” he said. — DayakDaily
