Tourism Minister and Bintulu MP Tiong King Sing has made a bit of a hero of himself the past couple of days, taking care to have himself filmed in his life jacket and up to his neck in water along with the rescue services helping victims of the city’s disastrous floods.
Whether the portly fellow was more help than hinderance is beside the point because locals will indeed appreciate his willingness to stand by them and suffer with them these consequences of botched development.
The plus side of his eye for publicity and PR is that he cares what voters think about him. It presented a stark contrast with others from the local GPS establishment pictured at the same time enjoying Chinese New Year celebrations, safe in their mansions with tables loaded with makan, whilst thousands have fled their homes and are relying on community support to eat.
They will not thank them for it.
The Man of the People moment has inspired Tiong to pronounce his views on why Bintulu and great swathes of East Malaysia are suffering the worst ever floods in memory. In a nutshell he blames a failure to address flaws in the city’s drainage system and to dredge the river bed.
However, there is more to this “worst disaster the state has faced” than the undoubtedly poor infrastructure record of Sarawak’s enviably well off state government. Indeed, Tiong’s solution to the consequences of careless and destructive development are predictably more efforts to engineer against nature, destroying the riverbeds in the process.
A key cause of the problems, as was predicted and is now universally recognised, are the effects of climate change caused by deforestation and burning of fossil fuels and deforestation itself, leading to torrential deluges of rain sweeping unhindered into the muddied rivers in a mass of erosion of top soil.
The folk living downriver in badly planned quick built cities are the sitting targets for all that water. This was a disaster waiting to happen as everyone has warned, yet the GPS government and its predecessors have been too busy filling their own pockets to address the problem.
Take a look at Tiong himself, who like almost all his political colleagues have profited from the razing of East Malaysia’s forest base. On assuming federal office in 2023 he relinquished his position as executive director and managing director of Timberwell Bhd, which is a massive plantation project in the heart of neighbouring Sabah’s former jungle.
According to public information, Timberwell was granted a so-called Sustainable Forest Management Licence Agreement (“SFMLA”) in 1997 covering an enormous area of 71,293 hectares in the natural forest in the Lingkabau Forest Reserve.
This allowed them to harvest the formerly protected forest and the licence has subsequently been upgraded to the status of an “Industrial Tree Plantation” area. What a disaster for the environment, but how much money stood to be made! Amongst his many other commercial interests this businessman politician owned just under a quarter of the company at that time.
Tiong and others need to accept that it is the short term interests of a handful of wealthy businessmen that have dominated in East Malaysia for the last half century and more and it is for this reason that basic care for the environment and the long term consequences of destroying the tropical rainforest have been utterly ignored.
As always, it is the poor native and local communities who have suffered whilst those businessmen celebrate in safety in their lofty mansions.
If Tiong has woken up to this reality, besides improving infrastructure projects what has he in mind to prevent and reverse the ongoing mindless destruction of the state?
