Sarawak Energy Berhad’s (Sarawak Energy) determined effort to empower the Penans in Murum through its literacy and education programmes has received international recognition. According to a press release, the state-owned utility company recently bagged the coveted ‘Excellence in Provision of Literacy and Education Award (Gold)’ at the 7th Annual Global CSR Summit and Awards 2015 held in Indonesia.
Republic of Indonesia’s Assistant Minister for International Cooperation, Ministry of Agriculture, Professor Dr Ir Tahlim Sudaryanto presented the award to Sarawak Energy chief of corporate services, Aisah Eden, representing chief executive officer Datuk Torstein Dale Sjotveit at the award ceremony held at Sheraton Mustika, Yogyakarta.
Also present at the event were Sarawak Energy’s senior manager II for CSR Jiwari Abdullah and social investment manager Joanne Tan. The company submitted its flagship Murum Penan Literacy Programme, which provided basic reading, writing and numeracy skills for the Penan community resettled by the Murum Hydropower Electric Project (HEP).
At an international conference in Indonesia recently, this monopoly Sarawak company was awarded a distinction for its programe to educate native Penan children. Very praiseworthy. That is until you know that the same people were forcibly ejected from their ancestral forests in order to allow the construction of a dam designed to provide unwanted and unsaleable electricity. By whom? Why Sarawak Energy of course.
So in compensation for evicting these people the generous Sarawak Energy provided some shelters to house them, a miserable and often undelivered food supply and of course literacy classes! Sarawak Report has already exposed how these children were travelling to school unsecured in dangerous vehicles on unmade logging tracks.
Sarawak Energy is of course state-owned and its Norweigan boss does precisely what he is told to do by Sarawak Governor and former Chief Minister Taib Mahmud. The latter suffers from a delusion that a series of mega dams will transform Sarawak by inducing multinationals to relocate massive manufacturing projects to Sarawak to take advantage of cheap electricity. One such, an aluminium smelter, is still trying to replace all its smelters which seized solid after a supply failure by Sarawak Energy!