Our oil and gas belongs to us, not KL

By Daniel John Jambun

The way I look at it, the Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak, has handled the issue of increased oil royalty very poorly, judging from the way he made his remarks in Putatan on Thursday.

He simply said that (1) The demand for increased royalty is just an opposition gimmick, (2) It is another empty promise of the opposition, (3) 20% or even 50% royalty doesn’t make economic sense because at this level of royalty, allocations to Sabah would have to be cut, (4) “Even their promises in the last election haven’t been fulfilled,” (5) The opposition is also promising to reduce petrol prices. These are very old and boring rehashed answers which are easy to rebut: The demand for increased oil royalty is not a gimmick but something which will definitely be implemented when BN loses Putrajaya, so it won’t be an empty promise when we win the election, and it makes a lot of economic sense for Sabah, Sarawak and Terengganu because with that level of royalty we won’t even need anymore federal allocation. The allocations we are getting today are in fact just crumbs compared to the huge amount we are giving to the Federal Government every year, and that is on top of the billions of annual taxes collected from Sabah. We haven’t fulfilled our promises in the last election because we didn’t take over Putrajaya yet. How does Najib think we can implement something which we promised “if the people vote BN out”? In fact it is the BN which failed to fulfil a lot of promises and created a lot of mess since coming to power so long ago. I have listed these in my long list of scandals and wasteful abuses of the people’s money – by the hundreds of billions – published in online portals under the title “Najib should clarify financial scandals.” I am still waiting for a reply.

The BN also needs to answer Raja Petra Kamaruddin’s very strong rationales on the issue which he had elaborated in Malaysia Today under the title “How East Malaysia and Terengganu were robbed of their wealth?” RPK’s reasoning and logic about the whole thing is very simple. He writes: “…both Barisan Nasional and Pakatan Rakyat are currently discussing how much Oil Royalty should be ‘given’ to those states that have oil and gas. How do you ‘give’ them something that already belongs to them in the first place? Should not the word we use be ‘take’? ….The oil and gas already belongs to the states. This is what the Malaysian Agreement and the earlier Federation Agreement was all about. And, in that Agreement, it was agreed that all natural resources would be the property of the states…. Water, timber, land, sand, minerals, etc., all belong to the states. As do oil and gas. These are what we call natural resources. Hence they belong 100% to the states, not 5% or 20% or 50% or whatever…. In 1973, Barisan Nasional was launched and PAS became part of the federal government. In 1974, the new ruling coalition in Parliament (where all the opposition parties except DAP were now members of) passed the Petroleum Development Act and the oil and gas were transferred from the states to the federal government, meaning Petronas. To keep the states quiet, they were given 5% as a token ‘Oil Royalty’.… Now, if the federal government had power over oil and gas, why the need to pass the Petroleum Development Act in Parliament? Just take it! But they couldn’t just take it. Oil and gas are the property of the states. So they needed to pass an Act of Parliament to legalise the illegal takeover of state property.”

Now, honorable Datuk Seri, these are very powerful statements which if wrong could land RPK into a lot of trouble, probably for treason. But if he is wrong, how come Putrajaya had not responded with a hue and cry about RPK being a liar or being seditious? Why? If it is true that Sabah, Sarawak and Terengganu have been cheated and robbed in broad daylight through the use of the Petroleum Development Act, the act should be amended or repealed for causing us great injustice and financial losses for so many decades.

Najib’s argument that the demand for higher oil royalty is not making economic sense is pure nonsense because, morally it is our oil, our God-given resource and was promised to be us in the Malaysian Agreement. If the Federal Government wants part of it then a reasonable percentage should be left for Sabah to enable it to develop itself, not take almost everything and leave 5 percent back, which is just crumbs. And talking about 5 percent, how much is it really? How do we know that what we are getting is really 5 percent of just 1 percent because the Petronas account report is supposed to be confidential?

In a statement published on February 15, I had said that with a 50 percent royalty, Sabah won’t even need anymore development allocation for the Federal Government, because we would then be able also to take care of not only our physical development but our health, education, and even security needs as well. We would be having revenues in the tens of billions per year, so why would we have to beg from Kuala Lumpur? We would then be having an annual budget of RM20 billion instead of the current RM4 billion which the BN leaders are calling “a huge budget”! If the Federal Government is worried that it would lose some of the revenues it is now collecting, then how about the fact that Sabah is now very poor because Kuala Lumpur is robbing its resources and taxes? Remember, it is not a case of us taking money from the Federal Government, but a case of the Federal Government robbing us of what rightly belongs to us.

We are not talking about oil royalty in isolation but in the context of the rights of Sabah, Sarawak and Terengganu. So why is the Barisan Nasional so reluctant to give the higher oil royalty? Why can’t BN just say, “OK, we will also give you 20 percent royalty if we are voted back into power”? Maybe there is only one reason: BN doesn’t want Sabah to progress too much because if it is too developed it will overtake the Peninsular and KL will no longer be able to treat it like a beggar.