SINCE the change of political landscape after the March 8 general election, Malaysia is entering an entirely new chapter in her history. Many of the political paradigms that appeared to have been cast in stone for the past half a century are now falling apart, and the immediate future of the country looks confusing, worrisome, uncertain, and yet exhilaratingly exciting.

One of the new exciting developments is the emergence of Sabah on the national centre stage. Suddenly, even Barisan Nasional MPs from Sabah have spoken out very critically — and some would say rebelliously — about long-standing federal neglect of the many urgent problems facing the Land Below the Wind.

The recent most act of rebellion was the announcement by the SAPP president Datuk Yong Teck Lee on June 18 that the two MPs from his party would support a no-confidence motion in Parliament against Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi. He had also produced an eight-point demand to showcase the major areas of Sabah’s concern on which he felt that the PM had given insufficient attention.

As expected, the national BN big wigs have come out with their guns blazing, and the air waves in our public sphere are saturated with political rhetoric, though most of it consists of personal attack against Yong, rather than a rational rebuttal of the points raised by him.

Then on June 24, even a Sabahan Umno MP came to the defence of Yong. When interviewed in Parliament, Kimanis MP Datuk Anifah Amin, one of the Sabahan MPs who had turned down a deputy minister post in the federal government, disagreed with the PM that Yong had acted out of personal greed.

He clarified that he might not agree with Yong about the no-confidence motion but he shared all of Yong’s feelings on the desperate need to tackle urgent problems confronting Sabahans. As I had suspected at first, those Umno men in Sabah are Sabahans first, and maybe BN YBs second!

One of the loudest grouses from BN MPs in Sabah has been the problem of the large presence of illegal immigrants in their state.

Today, nobody knows for certain exactly how many illegal immigrants there are in Sabah. The common estimate is about half of the total population at 1.5 million — or one illegal immigrant for every Sabahan!

Many Sarawakians have had to travel to Sabah for business or social visits, and some have gone there to work for long periods of time, so we are not entirely unfamiliar with the feeling of desperation of our next door neighbours.

Those mostly Muslim illegal migrants from Southern Philippines and Indonesia flood the major towns in Sabah. They are everywhere. One island off the coast a shout away from Kota Kinabalu houses tens of thousands of these permanent visitors. In Sandakan, you get squatter colonies occupied exclusively by aliens. The rumour that many of these migrants have been issued with ICs has been going the round for decades in Sabah, and nothing is seen to have been done by KL to curb this potential threat to the security and the interests of Sabahans.

Some markets in KK are exclusively run and patronised by Filipinos. From the wares they sell, the foreign tongue that fills the air, to the music from the stalls, you would get the impression that these markets are in the Philippines, rather than in Sabah.

In KK, the Chinese shopkeepers usually close down for business after 5pm, and at night, foreigners seem to take over the streets.

Again you get the surreal sense of being back somewhere in Manila. An old woman squats at the street corner trying to sell cigarettes with foreign brand name by the batang, as they do in Manila. Close by her, her small dirty children sleep on the bare cement floor against the wall. Sometimes you get to see the whole family bathing in a fountain pool in the public square.

I am told many of these migrants have been in Sabah for a few generations. They must be a heavy strain on all kinds of public facilities funded by Malaysian taxpayers. Exactly how the massive presence of such an illegal foreign population poses as a threat to our national security is yet to be ascertained.

By and large, Sarawakians have a kind of empathy with Sabahans, especially when it comes to our relationship with Kuala Lumpur. We are both East Malaysians after all. So we can more or less understand and share the fear of Sabahans on this issue of illegal migrants.

In a recent visit to Sabah, the PM has announced, among other things, that a Cabinet Committee will be set up to tackle the problem of illegal migrants in Sabah. A Sabah MP scoffed at this cosmetic measure, claiming that a similar Cabinet Committee was set up in 1992, but after one meeting, the committee fizzled out of existence.

What the Sabahans need is probably a Royal Commission of Enquiry to go to Sabah and investigate the extent of the problems, and to recommend various means of ameliorating their negative impact. Certainly, there ought to be an investigation into whether local politicians have any hand in the induction of Indonesians and Filipinos into Sabah.

For instance, there ought to be a statewide census in Sabah to determine the exact number of illegal migrants, and to store personal details of all such people in a data base. Then there ought to be bilateral discussions with our two neighbouring countries with regard to the prospect of long-term, human, and systematic repatriation. Perhaps the Malaysian Navy should be beefed up to patrol the long Sabah coastline with the help of satellite technology and helicopter patrol.

I do not know what I propose here will work or not, but it is always better to do something than to do nothing at all, as is the prevailing practice now.

It is very fortunate that Sarawak does not face this problem in a big way. For many reasons, the sea of illegal aliens in Sabah does not spill over the border into Sarawak. Other than that though, Sarawak does share many of the problems with our next-door neighbours to the north. Our major grouse is still our socio-economic backwardness compared to the dramatic development of many peninsular states.

By most major socio-economic indicators, in terms of number of miles of roads built, the number of bridges erected, the number of patients for each doctor, and such things as per capita income or incidence of poverty, we are many decades behind Peninsular Malaysia.

When we hear that Selangor has become a developed state with per capita income of RM45,000, we are green with envy. How many Sarawakians and Sabahans can enjoy such an average heavenly monthly salary of nearly RM4,000?

When we hear that the current poverty line in West Malaysia has been set at an income level of RM800, and the Selangor Pakatan Rakyat government is even proposing to raise that level to RM1,500 per month, we in Sarawak and Sabah are again green with envy, because that sort of wages are well nigh impossible in our States.

That is why hundreds of thousands of Sarawakian and Sabahan youths are now working in Johore and other peninsular states. They will tell you it is better to earn RM800 per month in a factory in Johore than for RM350 per month in a coffee shop in Kuching or KK. There are so many Dayaks in Johore that I hear our Dayak based parties in Sarawak are beginning to set up branches there!

This sort of regional disparity in socio-economic development is an impediment to national integration. In the past few decades, political power has been more and more concentrated in the hands of the federal government in Kuala Lumpur. Now that Umno rules Malaysia at the pleasure of the MPs from Sabah and Sarawak, it is only natural that marginalised voices from these two fringe states are making themselves heard.

What the politicians will do next is beyond our ken and control. The history of any nation does work in strange ways. What is certain is that the problems of Sabah and Sarawak are real national issues that demand urgent federal attention.