By C C Pung
Justice of Peace
I’m a member of the Sabah Golf & Country Club in my City of Kota Kinabalu for close to 30 years.
It’s a members’ club. This means the members are entitled to s share of the proceeds if the club is liquidated.
The club, with a well known 18-hole golf course and plenty of spare land, covers some 150 acres of the most sought-after land.
It’s just a few kilometres from the airport and surrounded by matured commercial and residential developments.
It’s worth billions. But the membership value has remained stagnant in a space where it has hardly any competition.
It brings to mind Sabah’s rich oil and has reserves which has strongly not made much difference to its citizens because the Malayans made us signed away our rights all those years ago when our leaders merely walked out of the forests.
Recent reports said Sabah has still about 1.5 billion barrels of oil and 1.1 trillions cubic feet of gas.
More reserves remain to be discovered. Recent crude oil prices ranged about USD80 per barrel.
Price outlook for gas is good even as the likes of Musk and BYD would want you to believe that the days of combustion engines is gone.
So, I did my elementary arithmetic to conclude that me, a Sabahan, is rich.
But for me to enjoy the riches like the Norwegians do based on their O&G wealth, I need to have sovergnity over the resources, and a bunch of smart people who knows arithmetic better than me, and know how to ensure that the resources can generate long term wealth.
But lo and behold, Sabah’s so called sovereign fund is managed by a bunch of people who are maths deficient and don’t understand data.
Their most infamous investment was in a sundry shop in the style of the 7-eleven, KK Mart and 99SPeedmart.
They refused to learn from the Berjaya-era disaster called Kojasa and the Najib-era Kedai Rakyat.
They started one. I predicted its demise.
Today, it’s sold to the richly successful 99SpeedMart, which of course went public in 2024.
A lot of child prodigies exhibited the ability to read at an early age.
Maths geniuses display their god-gifted brains at young ages and go on to do great things.
Music geniuses have unusual memory and tone distinction. Skills in maths, music can be cultivated.
The key is an education and culture that unfortunately absent in Malaysia.
Remember we cut maths classes to make way for religious lessons?
Remember the ‘discovery’recently that many children in Primary one could not recognise the alphabets?
There were some discussions recently about the qualities (more the lack of it) among our elected officials.
In the USA, the merits and demerits of DEI (diversity, equality, inclusiveness) are also being debated.
While DEI in the US is more about creating opportunities for non whites minorities and alternate genders, I hope there are quarters in Malaysia looking at DEI in terms of how the demographic profile of the civil service, the police, armed forces and other uniformed services could better reflect our diversity.
Editor: The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of talantang.com
