Community leaders especially Tuai Rumah should not be involved in illegal logging activities in their own native customary rights land (NCL) or collaborate with illegal loggers.
This advice came from Assistant Minister of Rural Development Datuk Francis Harden Hollis, who said getting themselves involved in such activities tantamount to committing crime.
“Simply selling timber just for fast bucks will not bring benefit to yourselves. By right you should be developing your idle NCL legally and get good returns from your venture,” Harden, who is also Simmanggang assemblyman, said at a community outreach programme called ‘Membara Semarak Kejiranan’ at Rumah Darwin, San Demam here yesterday.
It is rare that any BN politician in Sarawak says anything sensible, let alone honest. So let us congratulate Harden for advising Sarawakians not to get involved in illegal logging. Indeed they should not and that includes all those BN politicans from master thief Taib, down through Adenan to mere YBs.
Unfortunately he did not go on to make clear what he meant by the words “illegal logging.” The fact that Sarawak and its people have lost 95% of their major asset to a gang of crooks is the best evidence of illegal logging.
Their major national asset and for many, their way of life has been stolen by a group of crooked politicians and their cronies for personal profit. Most of that illegal profit has been hidden outside Malaysia by the politicians concerned so that the people of Sarawak are also deprived of the tax revenue that ought to have been generated if the forest had been logged legally and at true value.