Adenan voicing out is frustration at the Education Ministry is understandable

Over the past few months Chief Minister Adenan Satem has repeatedly been voicing out his frustration at the poor treatment accorded to Sarawak by the Education Ministry.

 

At official functions, he  is not shy to release his frustration by saying that he is sick and tired of telling the ministry to build new schools and repair old and dilapidated school buildings in the rural areas.

 

He had spoken to the ministry’s officials either publicly or privately, but brought little or negative results.

 

“If it is 10 or 15 years ago, I could understand, but after half a century, we are still backward in term of educational facilities. I cannot tolerate this anymore,” he often said at his official functions.

 

Not only he is frustrated for the poor conditions of school buildings in the rural teachers, he is also frustrated at the poor conditions of the teachers’ quarters.

 

In such a condition, the rural school children are the ones who will suffer due to the poor treatment accorded to Sarawak.

 

Adenan is also frustrated at the lack of allocations given to Sarawak under the Malaysian Development Plans to build new schools and teachers’ quarters.

 

It makes us wonder whether the Education Ministry is purposely neglecting Sarawak? Or whether those ministry’s officials in Malaya are aware of what are happening on the ground in Sarawak?

 

It has been suggested in the past that federal officials should visit rural Sarawak more often so they could understand the conditions on the ground.

 

Armed with such a knowledge, they could come up with a comprehensive and overall educational policy and how best they could help Sarawak.

 

According to Adenan, some of those officials have never been to Sarawak so that  put them in no position to come up with a comprehensive and overall education policy.

 

The Sarawak government, in many cases, is forced to come up with its own fund to help build and repair schools, though education is a federal subject.

 

This goes to show to what the extent that the state government is willing to help the rural population obtaining quality education.

 

Opposition parties, like Parti Bansa Dayak Sarawak (PBDS) and the DAP, sympathise with Adenan in asking for more education funding for Sarawak, but so far has not be quite successful.

 

PBDS president Cobbold John supported  Adenan who has been trying, but has met with incompetency on the part of the Education Ministry.

 

There are close to 470,000 students in Sarawak, with 42,000 teachers, according to the State Education Department. Over half of the students are from rural areas.

 

In June this year, a primary school in a fishing village in Spaoh, Betong, collapsed into a river, taking along with it a nursery and a surau. Fortunately, no one was injured.

 

Local authorities blamed riverbank erosion and the dilapidated condition of the structures of the school.

 

DAP Sarawak chairman Chong Chieng asked Adenan to stop whining and start taking action on the problematic education policy in Sarawak.

 

It is Chong’s belief that Adenan should  be more forceful in his demand, and stop being soft with the federal government.

 

The opposition man is right. There must be a way to force the Education Ministry to allocate more fund to Sarawak.

 

What have happened to the many promises made during the campaign in the past elections?

 

In 2014, the then Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin pledged a RM1 billion allocation to repair 600 schools in Sarawak and Sabah which were in dire need of repair.

 

When the Federal Budget for 2015 was tabled by Prime Minister Najib Razak, a sum of RM56 billion was allocated to the Education Ministry, but there was no mentioned of the RM1 billion for schools in the two Borneo states.

 

 “Either the prime minister and his deputy are not on speaking terms or Muhyiddin was lying when he gave the RM1 billion pledge,” Sabah opposition leader Jeffrey Kitingan was  then saying.

 

Perhaps, the  schools in Sabah and Sarawak were not a priority for the federal government.

 

Belaga assemblyman Liwan Lagang also complained about the promises made some years ago about upgrading of schools in Belaga, but have not been fulfilled.

 

Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, then the prime minister, made the promise to overhaul rural schools in Sarawak but until now, nothing much has done to improve these rural schools.

 

Therefore, it is small wonder that Adenan is a frustrated man these days over the empty promises of the federal government to improve rural schools in Sarawak. – Sarawakvoice

 

Editor’s note: The writer is a retired senior government officer, but is now a full-time social activist. He writes in his spare time.

Kredit : SarawakVoice.com