ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!!! WE SHOULD IMPLEMENT THE POINT 8 AND POINT 15 - TopicsExpress



          

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!!! WE SHOULD IMPLEMENT THE POINT 8 AND POINT 15 IN THE 20 POINTS Point 8: Borneonisation Borneonisation (Sabahanisation)of the public services should proceed as quickly as possible. As a consequence of Federal’s control on pensions (Article 112 of the Federal Constitution and Para 24 of the IGC Report) all promotions in the Federal Government and creation of new posts in the State require Federal approval due to the ‘pension factor’. An examination of existing records show that the number of federalized departments or agencies in Sabah has increased 4 times since independence. By 1985 there were some 62 Federal departments and agencies in Sabah, of which more than 90 per cent is currently headed by Semenanjung (Malaya) officers. According to the employment record, there are more than 21,000 Semenanjung officers working in Government offices in Sabah. This is a clear deviation of the Twenty Points and IGC safeguards. The usual justification used by the Federal Government to engage officers from Semenanjung to fill the federalized government positions is the lack of qualified Sabahans. However, it is found that even officers in the C and D categories are still being imported into the State from Kuala Lumpur. Furthermore, there has been no conscious plan to train prospective Sabahans and promote deserving Sabahans to take over senior posts from these Semenanjung officers. At a time when some 800 graduates and thousands of school leavers in Sabah are unemployed, the existence of a large number of civil servants from Semenanjung serving in Government departments give many Sabahans the feeling that they have been deprived of employment opportunities which in the context of the Twenty Points, are rightfully theirs. Point 15: Education The existing educational system of North Borneo should be maintained and for this reason it should be under State Control. The existing educational system referred to primary and secondary schools and teachers training colleges, but not university and other post graduate education. The Sabah delegation wanted to teach English at all levels of schools in the State as the medium of instruction. Malay and other vernacular languages, such as Kadazan and Chinese, were also to be taught and used as the media of instruction in lower level primary schools in some voluntary agency schools. It was the intention that the education policy and its development will be subject to constant adaptation and would move towards a national concept but it should not merely be an extension of existing Federal policy. In the IGC Report education was a federal subject although specific conditions were spelt out for its administration. The IGC Report also specified important conditions pertaining to education development in general including the use of English and implementation of indigenous education. In 1965, the Sabah Education Ordinance No 9 of 1961, was declared a federal law. During Tun Mustapha’s reign, the State Constitution was amended to make way for the use of Malay as the sole official language by 1973. When the Peninsular introduced Malay as the medium of instruction in Primary One in 1970, Tun Mustapha’s Administration adopted the same policy in Sabah. Since the Education Act 1961 was extended to Sabah only in 1976, the introduction of the national Educational Policy in Sabah in late 60s and early 70s with the tacit consent of the then State Government under Tun Mustapha was carried out without the proper legal authorities. However, this has since been rectified by the extension of the Education Act 1961. It is also important to note that the IGC Report made specific references to the responsibilities of the Federal government in developing educational infrastructure in Malaysia, “the requirement of the Borneo States should be given special consideration and the desirability of locating some of the institutions in the Borneo States should be borne in mind”. By and large, the Federal government has done little for Sabah in the development of higher education facilities, aside from the setting up of a YS-ITM campus and a makeshift UKM branch campus. Even a donation by the State government of 364 hectares of land in 1980 to be developed into a permanent campus of the UKM together with a $5.0 million contribution from Yayasan Sabah failed to elicit the ‘special consideration’ responsibility of the Federal government on the development of education infrastructure in Sabah as contained in the IGC Report. Yet in Kedah, the University Utara Malaysia which was only established in 1984, enjoys the full financing and other support of the Federal government as compared to the Sabah branch of UKM which was established in 1974, or ten years earlier. Such a phenomenon does not only violate the ‘special consideration’ clause supposedly accorded to Sabah but it also speaks of the inequity in the distribution of funds for educational purposes among component parts of the Federation of Malaysia.
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 03:20:58 +0000

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