Nobody at all was jumping up and down with glee in anticipation of Malaysia Day. This new-fangled holiday was a complete non-starter with my fellow Sarawakians. They regarded it with an indifference so profound that I can’t even call it “sullen”.
Sarawak was as beautiful and fresh as when I left it last. Simply to stroll about our kebun in the chill air at sunrise filled me with joy. We non-Muslims hardly noticed Hari Raya this year, and that struck me as different. Most of the shops in town stayed open and the vegetable market was also open for business, and stocked with jolly red capsicums and other goodies we see only on occasions when people are doing a lot of festive eating.
Nobody at all was jumping up and down with glee in anticipation of Malaysia Day. This new-fangled holiday was a complete non-starter with my fellow Sarawakians. They regarded it with an indifference so profound that I can’t even call it “sullen.”
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| Markets open |
Meantime the vegetables never stop growing, the papayas ripening and the watermelon and cucumber vines bearing fruit. They won’t wait and each morning the women bring their produce to town to sell for a few ringgit.
Likewise the thousands of plantation oil-palms. Labourers have to cut the bunches of nuts and load them in lorries, and drivers have to drive the lorries to the mill and the full tankers to the depôt.
Shopkeepers and repairmen are not especially keen to lose a day of business. What else is there to do anyway except make some money? I suppose that holidays are for the people who get a steady paycheck from somebody else, like our million plus civil servants.
Sarawak is my home, but this year I have only been able to visit at intervals. When one returns to a familiar place after a long absence the changes jump out. This Raya I returned to Sarawak and saw it was poor.
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| Most are still very poor |
In PP, none of the people I know is truly hard up. Those with land can still choose their own work and afford to be poor in comfort. Yet there’s always to possibility of an emergency, say an illness, and getting money to deal with that can be very difficult.
But it’s not the poverty of the people that struck me this visit. I’ve never known them to live any differently, and that’s a long time nothing has changed. What really got my attention were the things meant for public use, the roads, the water-supply, the telecommunications, in short, the infrastructure. It’s all so shabby and mean.
Look at the Pan-Borneo “Highway.” From Sematan to Bintulu (apart from a stretch approaching Serian) it consists of a single carriageway with a mere two lanes. Older portions have no shoulder. The western branch got paved as late as 1995. It took another ten years before the Batang Kayan was bridged. I suspect that these improvements happened only because that area of the state was being opened up to industrial scale oil-palm plantations. Now after repeated punishment from hundreds of heavy lorries that use the road every day carrying oil-palm, logs or sand, the road surface has pounded into humps and hollows.
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| Taib and family live the high life |
These are no mere grouses. As the population rises one must make provisions to preserve the public health. The Sarawak River has been described as the world’s largest open-air septic tank. A big flood—and we’re likely to get many more of them now that the trees are cut down—will dump plenty of nasty bacteria into the streets, some of which will reach the water-supply. Ill-maintained roads burdened with more traffic than they were designed to bear contribute to accidents.
In an ideal country, the public spends its money for its own benefit, on all those things which no single person can buy for himself. Spending in any government is always more or less of a gravy-train. The US has decent infrastructure, but look at its spending on armaments.
The dictator of Sarawak though is as exceptionally stingy as he is grasping. What percentage of the gross state product goes to keep the essentials in good shape can’t be much.
The story of Sarawak’s subjugation begins with the last rajah, Vyner Brooke. Vyner never liked Sarawak. He liked being rajah, though, and if he couldn’t be rajah then he’d be damned before he’d let anybody else be rajah. After the Japanese occupation Vyner looked at the mess, despaired of repairing the damage, and unloaded Sarawak on the Brits. The Brits, in turn, unloaded it on Malaysia. Neither Vyner nor the Brits could get out of Sarawak fast enough.
On the hangover day-after Malaysia Day let’s consider an alternative Sarawak. Suppose Vyner had not been such a prick and handed the rajah-ship to his scrupulously conscientious brother Bertram. It could not have escaped Bertram, nor his son Anthony, that Sarawak, with just a little help, was potentially a very rich state. They knew at the time there was as much oil in Sarawak as in Brunei or North Borneo, and a geologist could have told them they’d find much more.
Oil would have brought the cash to rebuild. Oil usage was rising worldwide in the 50s and 60s. Brunei was well fixed by 1963. A Brooke rajah would have kept up the Brooke tradition of barring foreign filibusterers and exploiters from the country. Soon it would have been possible to plan for the selective and profitable use of Sarawak’s natural resources. Logging might have been developed in a wise fashion, to sell top quality tropical timber for quality use, instead of trashing the forests into cheap plywood for concrete forms.
With prosperity would come education and healthcare. With education would come responsible political awareness. Since Sarawakians get along easily, a democratic constitution would be debated and established. Our hypothetical Rajah Brooke of this era would now probably be half Dayak or Chinese.
An intact Sarawak in 2010 would have been the jewel of the world of tourism, as prosperous as Singapore, and as wild as only Sarawak was, while Semenanjung would still be the dump that the crooks were determined to make it. - Hornbill Unleashed
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