By C C Pung
Justice of Peace
FEW Peninsular Malaysians I know ever spoke in support of the socalled Sabah for Sabahans slogan.
They called it parochial, narrow-minded and bad for Malaysia.
The same people, if you asked them, will tell you wrongly that Malaysia was born in 1957 (it’s actually 1963) and that Malaysia Day is Aug 31 (it’s Sept 16).
Some will tell you that Kuching is the capital of Sabah State, and that Sandakan is a Town in Sarawak.
In thr 90s, I still had a KL cabbie asking me if we had taxis in Sabah.
Peninsular and East Malaysia are separated by the South China Sea. It’s a 2000+ km? 2+ hour flight gap.
But sometimes it feels like an unbridgeable chasm that is inclined the British colonialists and the subsequent Malayan neocolonialists for beingbcruel and dumb by forcing orbfacilitating the matching of two completely different types of people whose only thing in common is they are homosapiens.
Òbsessed with their desire for communal dominance,
Malaya eyed the natives (bumiputra) of Sabah and Sarawak to offset the imagined threat of the Chinese in Singapore in the eventual demographic profile of the country (then yet to be constituted) of Malaysia.
From the word go, Malaya and ofter it’s officials, treated east Malaysia as inferiors.
It was indeed relatively backward compared to Malaya.
As if to remind the lesser Sabahans, scholars after Malay scholars have over the years revealed pseudo research reiterating the age and superiority of the Malay civilisation.
Fed up with years of being farted on and marginalised, Sabahans started the S4s movement in the 80s.
It galvanised the simmering of the people against the political elite sponsored and manipulated by Malaya.
It installed the pro-S4S party PBS in power. The forces in Malaya wasn’t amused.
Thus begun the years of suppression and social engineering to manufacture a set of electorals dominated by Muslims.
Decades on, and in between a Royal Commussion of Inquiry, the truth has come out that a scam called Projek IC carried out by supremacist KL officials with extensive Sabah allies imported economic migrants from depressed Indonesian and Filipino provinces, fast-trach their citizenship and voter status.
The years of social engineering bloated the electoral rolls.
Made a mockery of the statistics, and forever altered Sabah’s demographic landscape.
At the last count (who’s counting?) Sabah’s population swelled by at least a million.
Some say more.
Sabahans lived with this. Are still living with it. There’s an anger, unvented but they don’t know who at.
Some Malayans alleged that Sabahans benci (hate) them.
Well, I don’t hate any Malayan to an extent of wishing them ill. But I can’t say I love my Malayan fellow countrymen.
It’s bizzare. I sort of hate you but can’t bring myself to punch you.
Therefore, every chance I get to throw that imagery grudge punch, like in an election, many Sabahans took their angst out on candidates, who are many Sabah born and bred.
The results of the last election on Nov 29 was a referendum on S4S.
The vote was overwhelming. We like to keep Sabah for ourselves. You can keep your Selangor or tanah Melayu or what have you.
Leave us alone.
Stay away from each other and live happily we very after.
You wish.
We have unfortunately have a head of government who has some dirty linen in the hands of puppeteers in high places.
He’s been told to ignore the votes, the S4S and continue to knowingly keep a handful of Trojan Horses in the state government apparatus.
Sabahans can see the sell out.
Well, S4S went into hibernation after a high in the 80s and 90s but people-based strength and potential were not diminished.
It will rise again.
