Sarawak Chief Minister Adenan Satem is reported to have said yesterday (23 Oct) that his government would table a motion at the coming state legislative assembly sitting (Nov 21 to 30) on reclaiming Sarawak’s rights.
He said that the motion would focus specifically on the need for the federal government to honour what have been agreed on with regard to Sarawak rights.
The rights are spelled out in three important documents, viz: the Malaysia Agreement 1963 (MA63), The Inter-Goverment Committee Report (IGC) 1963, and the Cobbold Commission Report 1962.
Adenan could have seen the light after having been stung by the prime minister’s 2017 Budget.
The budget said not “lu tolong gua, gua tolong lu” (you help me, I help you) but “lu tolong gua, gua lupa lu (you help me, I forget you).”
One hopes Adenan means business.
One also hopes that the others in his cabinet will stop whining about Sarawak being treated like a stepchild by the federal government but do nothing more, and for once do what they should have done a long time ago.
Sarawak is rich. Very rich. Over the last 53 years, billions and billions has been sucked out of it to develop Malaya, to build grandiose structures such as the Petronas Twin Towers and magnificent hospitals and stadia, expressways and bridges and railway lines, etc.
The very latest project that Sarawak will help to pay is the double-tracked East Coast Rail Line (ECRL). How much will it cost? RM55 billion. You know that.
But that’s the current figure. You know very well that by the time it is completed... Need I complete that sentence?
But Sarawak is among the poorest states.
Many of its schools are no better than rotting barns. Its main general hospital is overcrowded. Its only highway, which is but a portion of the Pan-Borneo Highway, at that, is only just being constructed. The whole costs less than one-half that of the ECRL. Because it definitely isn’t going to be a six-lane highway like you have in Malaya.
Sarawak has been getting nothing more than the proverbial crumbs.
And one broken promise after another.
And to rub rough rock salt into the deep, gaping wound, many Malayans have often insulted Sarawak’s people.
Even a week ago, a Malayan university professor told Sarawakians to immigrate if they did not like Malaysia. Mind you, the said professor was speaking at a conference not in Malaya but in Sarawak.
Why would she have such arrogance if not for the subservient cabinet ministers, past and present, in Sarawak?
To digress a little, it also shows the - ahem! - ‘high’ standard of education in Malaysia.
If a university professor does not know that Sarawakians would immigrate into Sarawak, and that such an idea is absolutely absurd, then you can’t expect undergraduates to be very well schooled.
Adenan and his cabinet ministers must restore the - ah, here comes one of the most spoken words in Malaya lately - dignity of their fellow Sarawakians.
The only way they can do that is to stand up straight, plant their feet firmly down, and put Putrajaya in its place.
How rich is Sarawak?
We have very often heard of people saying that Sarawak is very rich. But none of them has told us how it is so.
One of the reasons no one has is that the bulk of Sarawak’s wealth is not readily seen. You often don’t know, or aren’t aware of, what you don’t see.
It lies deep underground, at places far away from sight.
In 1959, Sarawak Shell detected geological formations that suggested the presence of a large amount of hydrocarbons deep below the seabed in the Central Luconia Province, which is some 100 nautical miles offshore Bintulu.
The technology at that time was not advanced enough to enable the company to pursue its exploration activities further.
By the mid-Sixties, advances in surveying and drilling technologies and in drilling vessels enabled the company to do so.
And it struck gaseous gold.
The amount of non-associated natural gas present deep below the seabed was sufficiently large for the company to proceed to build one of the 12 largest natural gas liquefaction plants in the world.
The reserves today would be around 24 trillion standard cubic feet (tscf).
You liquefy the gas to make transport of it feasible. You liquefy it by applying cryogenic technology, which cools the gas down to -161 degrees C.
To give you an idea of how cold that is, let me tell you that the pipe which transports the liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the liquefaction plant to the loading jetty is always covered with frost even in the midday sun.
At that low temperature, the LNG occupies only one-sixhundredth of the volume in its former gaseous state.
You do the maths, and you’ll see the enormous amount of LNG than can be made available for export.
You next have black gold. It is difficult for the layman such as this scribbler to get exact figures. But if you work on a conservative estimate of 80,000 barrels per day, you should be pretty close.
Multiply 80,000 by the current crude oil price per barrel, and you can very well imagine how much moolah flows up from the bowels of the earth offshore Sarawak every single day.
You can forget about timber. Most of it has gone to make some people occupying the right positions and those connected to the right people billionaires.
But you also have antimony, bauxite, coal, gold, kaolinitic clay, and silica sand as well as other minerals and precious stones such as diamonds in many areas.
Yes, Sarawak is very rich.
Adenan and his cabinet ministers must fight hard for Sarawak to get what it rightly deserves, to have control of important matters such as education, management of its revenues and religion, and to be regarded as a partner of Malaya as it was agreed to be rather than merely a component state of it.
That means Putrajaya must honour the contents of the three abovementioned documents.
Fifty-three years of the federal government’s omission must come to an end. Will Adenan put a stop to it?
ODIN TAJUE is a regular Malaysiakini commenter.
