The Malaysian Insight

FORMER Pakatan Harapan (PH) leaders, including a deputy minister in charge of rural development, have endorsed a United Nations report on poverty that was recently dismissed by the Perikatan Nasional (PN) government.

The lawmakers said the findings dovetail with their experiences in tackling poverty and hardship in Malaysia while they were part of the 22-month government, whose reign abruptly ended in late February.

They said all of the report’s findings were true especially on the civil service’s abysmal lack of data on vulnerable groups, and the ad-hoc approach the government takes to aiding the poor.

The report was written by UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights Phillip Alston, who had visited destitute communities including the urban and rural poor, Orang Asli and migrant workers in Malaysia last year.

The report showed that Malaysia grossly under-counts poor and destitute communities in the country due to its low poverty-line income (PLI) of RM980 per household per month.

The PN administration, which deposed PH in a bloodless coup in late February, had rubbished Alston’s report.

Sivarasa Rasiah said the report’s findings mirrored what he saw during his tenure as deputy rural and regional development minister under PH.

“I have nothing to disagree with the report, except a quibble about a statistic or two. I pretty much endorse the views in that report,” Sivarasa said during a webinar titled “A conversation with Prof Phillip Alston”.

“In my 20 months as a deputy minister I did a fair amount of travel and when it comes to rural poverty, Kelantan, Sabah and Sarawak have the highest number of poor districts,” he said during the webinar organised by human rights group Proham.

“And what I saw dovetails with your report,” Sivarasa said adding that there were issues concerning reliable data on the poor and how money meant for the poor was spent.

The ministry was mainly involved with building rural infrastructure such as roads, clean water and electricity to all villages in Sabah, Sarawak and Peninsular Malaysia.

“I had asked the bureaucracy, how many villages still lack any roads, clean water or electricity? And they could not answer. They told me that their data on Sabah and Sarawak was 15% complete.

“This was shocking for a ministry that had operated for decades and focused on rural areas.”

Another major obstacle was in the distribution of funds, as under the former Barisan Nasional (BN) government, which had ruled for close to five decades, development was influenced by patronage politics.

“It was ad hoc and based on applications dominated by political patronage, depending on which MP or state lawmaker applied and which warlord wanted to divert resources,” Sivarasa said.

The manner in which the funds were spent was also a problem, he added, saying that the ministry’s cost to install electricity to a rural home was RM120,000.

In comparison, CSOs working in the interior often could do that amount of work with one-tenth of the cost, Sivarasa said.

“(At the government’s rate) a rural household would need to wait decades to get either clean water or electricity.”

There was also an ethnic dimension to poverty eradication efforts due to BN’s legacy of race-based politics, he said.

“In my urban constituency, many of the non-Malay urban poor have fallen through the cracks,” said the Sg Buloh MP.

“About 15% of my voters are Indians but they make up 30% of the urban poor in my constituency.”

Another lawmaker, Kasthrui Patto of Penang, said the BN administration often preferred giving handouts and taking short-term, ad hoc approaches to dealing with poverty rather than crafting long-term programmes.

“It is always ad hoc. You will find a story about a hardcore poor family living in the jungle and tomorrow the government comes with aid to build a house or sponsor a child,” said the Batu Kawan MP.

However, there is no policy or proposal on a long-term approach to tackling hardship in urban areas as the perception in Malaysia is that it does not exist because of Malaysia’s low poverty line.

“BN quashed debate on how to address poverty in the long term because they rather give out band aids.” – July 10, 2020.