ALOR STAR – Kedah Menteri Besar Datuk Seri Muhammad Sanusi Md Nor has received a smacking telling-off for seeming to pin the blame on the state’s woes under his administration onto the previous government.
Kedah DAP chairman Tan Kok Yew said that if Sanusi likes to pass the blame to others, then he should not be claiming credit for work done by others too.
Sanusi should not boast about pulling in RM43 billion worth of foreign direct investments (FDI) last year as the previous Pakatan Harapan (PH) state government had played a big role in wooing investors here, he said.
The FDI in the first quarter of 2021 was the highest in the country then, and the Kedah menteri besar had boasted about the achievement for months, when in reality it was PH who initiated the effort to woo a record number of investors, which led to the garnering of a record investment sum, Tan added.
Tan, who was a state executive councillor in the short-lived PH government, was commenting on Sanusi earlier today, who reportedly blamed PH for the water woes that have hit Kedahans and soured their celebration of the recent Hari Raya Aidilfitri.
During the celebrations, several rural localities suffered low water pressure. Last night, half of the population in the state capital here suffered from interruptions in the water supply.
Currently, up to 75,000 households here and in Pokok Sena are suffering a major disruption after an irrigation canal bund collapsed last night, severing supply from two treatment centres here.
Sanusi claimed that the PH administration was slow to upgrade water treatment plants in Pokok Sena and Bukit Pinang, causing the water concessionaire Syarikat Air Darul Aman Sdn Bhd (Sada) to face difficulty in supplying water in the event of a disruption.
He later visited the canal bund site at Kg Lubuk Batu where he announced that the repair works are expected to cost between RM1.5 million and RM1.8 million.
If one can blame PH for the water woes, one cannot claim credit for the record FDI, as it also initiated during the PH era. Sanusi should just do his work and stop finding scapegoats,” Tan told The Vibes here.
The approved FDI investment of RM43 billion for Kedah in the first quarter of last year was a stunning achievement at a time of gloomy economic outlook globally.
Tan said that the collapsed bund is a serious incident, and it could reflect negligence or perhaps the lack of maintenance on the facility.
“It has nothing to do with policy nor weaknesses of the PH,” he said.
Sanusi took the mantle of leading Kedah with the new government that wrested power in early 2020.
Tan said that surely if the matter of water supply was a grave issue, he should have responded promptly instead of sitting around and choosing to blame others now.
Meanwhile, Penang Deputy Chief Minister II P. Ramasamy, in a social media posting, accused Sanusi of blaming others so the people cannot see his own faults.
“As though his government is flawless when it comes to the matter of discussing water issues in the state.
“For some time, his favourite topic was the Sg Muda water supply from Kedah to Penang.
“He spent considerable time scolding Penang for not compensating for the water drawn from Sg Muda with its source in the Ulu Muda.”
However, Sanusi had conveniently forgotten that Penang draws water from its side of the river with Kedah, said Ramasamy, who is DAP’s Prai assemblyman.
This is what is termed as riparian rights – the right to withdraw water from within the boundaries of states or countries, he added.
He was quiet for a while, but now he has started his blame game – not on Penang but on the former PH state government.”
Recently, there has been some bad publicity about Kedahans going without water supply not for days or months, but for years, Ramasamy noted.
“The problem with the PAS-led state government is that they preach more than they do things. Since PAS is a religious party, its members can do no wrong,” he quipped.
A water infrastructure engineer, who preferred not to be named, said that Kedah faces a mammoth task to upgrade its water supply services, especially in the rural areas.
Besides dealing with climate change where drought becomes more pronounced, Kedah has many rusty and leaking pipes which have resulted in leakages leading to non-revenue water loss.
There is also shoddy maintenance of its water treatment plants, the engineer alleged.
There needs to be an injection of huge capital expenditure to ensure that the water supply is on par with the expectations of consumers and to reassure investors in the commercial and industrial sectors of its dependability, he said. – The Vibes, May 10, 2022
