The control over Sarawak, first awarded by a series of Sultans of Brunei, and then by the Brooke Rajahs, to the State’s small minority Malay/Melanau community has, right from the outset, been abused to the personal profit of those in it. The saga of mismanagement and corruption, officialised by the Brookes and tolerated by the British, gained a new lease of life after, with the concurrence of Kuala Lumpur, the Iban political leadership of the State was ousted and neutralised and the reign of corruption over which Taib Mahmud has presided for decades given a free pass to rob the State at will. Notably by destroying its main asset, its tropical forest.

That forest had survived the Brookes and the British but fell victim to the criminal Taib regime, who have destroyed it for personal profit and with it the livelehood of most of the true natives of the State. That they have been able to get away with that mega crime is due to two factors. First to the control over the State Assembly and government officials obtained by election bribery and similar illegal actions and secondly to the failure of successive Federal administrations to enforce the law relating to corruption and other abuses.

This latter seems to be directly traceable to an agreement (of blatant illegality) whereby Taib surrendered Sarawak’s oil reserves to the National Oil company in return for a covert promise to ignore his rape of Sarawak’s forests. More recently this matter threatened to become public by way of Court action but that seems to have been smothered in one way or another.

So for how much longer will the reforming PH government elected in 2018 allow this massive criminality to continue unchecked. The “excuse” that Sarawak votes are needed to pass Constitutional reform in the Federal Assembly is just that. An excuse and an inexcusable one. All the wrongdoing can, and should, be corrected by an intensive MACC probe in Sarawak which should see Taib and many of his followers in a Sarawak prison, their criminal gains returned to public ownership, and a new Sarawak State Assembly in place to provide the votes needed for Constitutional reform. That would be the honourable course. To gain the objective by the use of tainted criminal voices would be the opposite.