KOTA KINABALU – Upko president Datuk Seri Wilfred Madius Tangau has proposed that a way to single out migrants who were issued MyKads in Sabah over the decades is to recall and reissue the documents.
This way, the nationality of a person can be scrutinised and the citizenship record can be updated, he said at the Tuaran Upko triennial general meeting today.
He also said Sabah’s current poverty and socio-economic issues are the result of the “work” by politicians who brought in Umno in 1991.
Tangau, who is Tuaran MP, alleged these leaders had “betrayed, tricked and lied” to Sabahans and engineered the state’s demographics to keep themselves in power.
“Today the poverty rate stood at 25% in Sabah, making it the poorest region in Malaysia. Imagine, of the 3.8 million of Sabah’s population, the nationalities of around a million of them are in question.
He said the rights of locals in the rural areas are being neglected, resulting in dilapidated schools, damaged roads as well as a lack of job creation.
Under Umno’s reign, Tangau said there was a 843.6% surge of the population in the state between 1961 and 2021.
For instance, the population of Sabah jumped from 454,561 to 1,736,902 between 1961 and 1991.
The numbers surged from 1,736,902 in 1991 to 3.8 million people in 2021, he said.
He claimed that the link between the supposed demographic manipulation and Umno was uncovered when Tan Sri Bernard Dompok was Upko president and appointed to chair a parliamentary select committee in 2007 to look into the National Registration Department’s integrity.
“This led to the pressure from Upko to then-prime minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak to form the royal commission of inquiry on undocumented migrants in Sabah.”
The RCI was eventually established in 2012 and its findings were presented in Parliament in 2013.
To this end, Tangau said these leaders should now be brought to justice for their roles in turning Sabah to what it is today. – The Vibes, February 18, 2022
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