Sabah Current issue: Land Of Sabah

The State Government should take back the more than 300,000 acres given to Felda, Felcra and agropolitan projects or the more than 30,000 acres given to Yayasan Melaka and Yayasan Selangor if it is serious in protecting the native land ownership and increasing native land acreage.

Sabah Star Chairman, Datuk Dr Jeffrey Kitingan, said perhaps the State Government should also ask the Federal Government to get the other state governments controlled by Barisan Nasional (BN) to alienate 300,000 acres in the peninsula and the Malacca and Selangor state governments to alienate 30,000 acres to Sabah Land Development Board and Lembaga Industri Getah Sabah.

He said the State Government has all the powers and machinery to easily solve the current land problems and disputes.

"What is required is just pro-active action and real effort to identify the root cause and exercise its powers to settle the matter," he said.

"Land problems are widespread in every part of the State and if the State Government had acted pro-actively in the first place, no such land problems would have arisen," he said.

In fact, during the British colonial times, there were no such land problems probably due to better administration by the colonial masters for the betterment of the natives without conflict of self-interests and vested interests of their political masters and their hidden agenda.

In a statement here, he said the natives peacefully went about working on their land without having to fear companies and outsiders taking over the land and destroying their crops or destruction of their homes and disrupting their livelihood.

"A quick survey of the land problems will reveal that most of the problems involve native rights and weaknesses in the government administration and its bureaucracy.

Kitingan said there were instances of improper surveys resulting in a title being issued with a boundary that cut across the house of natives and failure to even identify the existence of villages in the land surveyed and even complaints of survey done on paper or in the air by helicopter.

Some of these survey problems were acknowledged by the Land and Survey Department but no action was taken to rectify the mistakes, he said.

He said native land rights and NCR are entrenched in the laws of Sabah, long before its independence and long before the formation of Malaysia in 1963.

The claims of native land rights and NCR should be a simple investigative and verification procedure to establish and determine the claims of the natives involved.

"What is so difficult about verifying the NCR claims that it requires in some cases 30 years or more?

Just go to the ground and the claims can be verified in a matter of weeks," he said.

The claims of NCR by the natives should be resolved and it can be done expeditiously by a Land Commission, which Star Sabah is proposing to establish to resolve all land issues and disputes, he said.

"The issuance of communal titles on a fast-track basis and to pacify the anger of the natives are but a stop-gap measure done in view of the impending general elections," he said.

"It is another time-bomb waiting to explode," he claimed.

Daily Express Sabah