COMMENT: Let us cut to the chase and admit that there appears to be much monkey business in our local tourism industry.
To those outside, it does not look like a well supervised sector that lays the golden egg for the state.
The Mengalum catamaran boat incident that has claimed the lives of three tourists from China (and with five people still unaccounted for at the time of writing) was an incident waiting to happen.
This was a second major incident involving tourists from China, all within a space of eight months.
Last June, the Malaysia Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA) rescued 22 people including 12 Chinese tourists as their boat sprung a leak while they were returning to Kuala Abai from Pulau Mantanani, off Kota Belud.
The person who designed and built this catamaran claims that it was never meant for open seas, and certainly to fit only 12 people and not more. The catamaran had 31 people on board when it capsized. File photo of the catamaran. – Photo provided by MMEA Sabah
In the Mengalum incident, the boat – according to a Facebook posting by one Daniel Doughty who claimed he was responsible for the design and had built it (catamaran) for the WWF-Malaysia – was never meant for the waves of Mengalum. It was built for research work off Semporna waters.
It got damaged and nearly sank near Pom Pom island but was patched up.
He said to convert it into a passenger boat that carried 32 passengers instead of 12 as it was built for, was suicidal.
According to a local daily, dirt cheap optional tours sold on the internet in China with our “cowboy” operators willing to accommodate these tours can be fingered as the cause of the tragedy.
“China is responsible for 50 percent of the cause, and the other 50 percent falls on Sabah” said one agent.
How the local authorities managed to keep a blind eye on the goings on at an unsanctioned jetty just boils down to apathy or corruption.
There are rogue players everywhere, and with Sabah moving to be a top draw in eco-tourism in South East Asia, many unscrupulous people will be drawn to the industry to try their luck.
This is where, policing of the industry must be top notch.
It’s not worth paying peanuts for ‘dirt-cheap’ tours when one does not get the full service, especially when lives are at stake.
While this is not the right time to point fingers in the wake of the tragedy and the authorities are not totally at fault as some things are beyond their control, stringent guidelines and a better enforcement must be in place.
The unsanctioned jetty in Tanjung Aru where the boat had departed from was put ‘out of bounds’ to tourist boats and rightly so. Then how did such jetties exist in the first place?
Some people, somewhere, must have turned a blind eye until disaster struck. Then everybody woke up and got busy.
The industry needs better supervision; workers including boatmen must be properly trained especially in the safety aspects.
Authorities must be serious, where only big and seaworthy boats are allowed to carry passengers from designated points. And high level safety features must be equipped in all the boats like Communication Identification System (AIS), a radio or a satellite phone is a must, for example.
We cannot be too careless when lives are at stake here, especially tourist lives as this will send shockwaves around the world resulting in many cancelling their trips, which in turn will have an adverse effect on the industry.
Safety is everything. No slackness or cutting corners is to be tolerated.
We don’t want another tragedy to happen and the same incoherent noises are made all over again like we have not learnt anything.
It is time for all players in the industry, as well as the state government, to get serious and buck up
CORRUPTION DUE TO GREED WITH THOSE IN POSITION AND POWER
They are getting younger and it’s alarming.
The massive loot that was seized from the houses of two top officials from a Sabah state agency in what must have been the biggest corruption case in the country.
According to MACC deputy chief commissioner (prevention) Datuk Shamshun Baharin Mohd Jamil at a forum recently, in the past three years over half of those arrested for corruption have been from the age below 40.
More people have been arrested by his agency in recent years, reaching a high of 932 arrests last year.
Some 54 percent or 1,267 individuals of 2,329 individuals arrested since the last three years from 2012-2016 are individuals aged below forty.
Then there were tough words from the MACCs chief commissioner, Datuk Dzulkifli Ahmad speaking on television on January 26 warning corrupt politicians that he would not let anything stop him from going after them.
He was not worried about “protected individuals”, those who commit corruption would have action taken against them, he reiterated.
While there have been some high profile cases with the arrests of some senior civil servants, with Sabah’s “Water-gate”, topping the list with the recovery of a staggering sum of RM183.8 million in cash and other luxury items, not many politicians have been arrested.
This has prompted Transparency International Malaysia (TI-M) president, Datuk Akhbar Sattar to go on record urging the MACC to go after politicians as well.
Only two politicians out of 670 people were arrested in 2015, and another two until October 2016, he said.
Akbar also added that according to the Malaysian Corruption Barometer Survey in 2014, political parties were the most corrupt, followed by the police and civil servants.
Deputy Prime Minister, Datuk Ahmad Zahid Hamidi was reported as saying he was in support of the so called MACC’s “second wave”, as the agency was given “ample time”, to investigate and conduct searches and to act immediately on all information involving corruption.
Corruption is a disease that can destroy a nation, a serious approach by all concerned must be the order of the day. It is due to greed with those with position and power.
Besides punishment such as jail sentence meted out to those found guilty, those responsible for fighting corruption must also reach out especially to the young as moral n religious studies in the school curriculum dont seem to be effective in this context.
Family must play a big role too in educating their children on morals and a module on “Ethics” must be made compulsory to all, the earlier the better. As the saying goes a fish rots from the head down, the MACCs “second wave” must be commended.
Members of the public await with bated breath to see if this is the real deal. - Borneo Today
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