KOTA KINABALU, January 11, 2019: Pakatan Harapan (PH) and Parti Warisan Sabah (Warisan) leaders should stop clowning around and focus on solving real issues which affect the people’s lives, said Gee Tien Siong, SAPP vice president.
He pointed out that some of these issues though are not as big-and-complicated as the Malaysia Agreement 1963 issue, they were affecting the people’ lives almost on daily basis.
He cited for example, the public roads in the city, both in the commercial and industrial areas and the housing estates are currently in bad condition riddled with potholes, thus posing great inconvenience and hazard to motorists, especially during night time and rainy days. Besides this, such a bad road condition also contributes to high car maintenance cost for the car owner.
He claimed that a recent random check carried out by him and his team of volunteers, following received of public complaints, discovered that the condition of the public roads in many parts of the city has gone from bad to worse. Some of the roads were damaged by the flyovers construction and left unrepaired.
“Instead of fighting among themselves over government positions, and issuing rhetorical-and-misleading statements on issues like meagre Federal government allocations for Sabah, besides providing ‘lip service’ to seek for cheap publicity, these elected representatives from the ruling coalition of Pakatan Harapan and Warisan should go down to the ground to better assess the situation, and to come up with effective solutions to resolve the people’s plights. Besides the issue of poor road condition, there are also other pressing issues like escalating cost of living, and acute shortage of workers at the eateries.
“And the Pakatan Harapan and Warisan Members of Parliament should also be more aggressive in demanding for more allocations from the Federal government, for the development and maintenance of infrastructure in Sabah, instead of lamenting over Federal government’s generous allocations for Kuala Lumpur City Hall (DBKL),” Gee contended.
He finds it amusing that recently while Minister of Agriculture and Food Industries Junz Wong expressed dissatisfaction that the federal government has allocated RM 2.89 billion to DBKL (when Sabah was only allocated a total of RM5 billion), DAP MP for Kota Kinabalu, Chan Foong Hin quickly came out to rationalize the said allocation.
Gee claimed that feedback gathered from the ground indicated that the people were largely disappointed and dissatisfied with the performance of the Warisan-led State government, which appears to be in disarray still, despite having formed the State Cabinet for close to seven months now.
“Such a sad-and-discouraging state of affairs was obviously due to the lack of competent leaders in the Warisan-led State government. This can be seen from their often shallow, unintelligent, erratic and ludicrous statements and response to various issues.
“They obviously have no clue of what they were thinking when dealing with issues affecting the state and the people. Among the glaring examples were the imposition of 5% sales tax on live and frozen fish exports beginning this month, which may ultimately cripple Sabah aquaculture industry; then there was the delay in the implementation of the nationwide smoking ban in Sabah, which came into effect on 1 January,” he pointed out.
He thus urged the State government and its leaders to engage those who are truly qualified and knowledgeable as advisors, so that they don’t make a fool of themselves, or inflicting unnecessary misery to the people.