Najib deserves big mandate in 13th GE — Awg Tengah

WELCOME TO KUCHING: Second Minister for Resource Planning and Environment Datuk Amar Awang Tengah Ali Hassan welcomes South Korea Dongbu Group president Myung Oh (left) during a courtesy call at his office at Wisma Sumber Alam in Kuching Saturday.

KUCHING: It is imperative that Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak be given a bigger mandate in the 13th general election to enable him to continue leading Malaysia and ensure continuity in his transformation and development programmes.

Second Minister for Resource Planning and Environment Datuk Amar Awang Tengah Ali Hassan said since Najib became the prime minister, Sarawak had received higher allocations for development.

“In the 1960s, Sarawak only had about 800km of roads, and by 2008 it increased to 18,000km due to the excellent state-federal relationships,” he said in a press statement.  “And for the 2013-2016 development budget, Sarawak was given RM2.5 billion for infrastructure alone.”

Awang Tengah, who was interviewed at his office at Wisma Sumber Alam recently, pointed out that under the National Key Results Areas (NKRA), the budget for Rural Electricity Supply (RES) was RM1.75 billion, and it would benefit some 77,000 households and push the RES supply to between 87 per cent and 90 per cent in the state.

For clean water supply in the rural areas, he said, Sarawak was given RM1.77 billion, benefiting 93,000 users or 82 per cent of the population.

“But the more important fact is that the rural areas were also experiencing transformations, more so with good economic performance.”

On communication, Awang Tengah said the federal allocation for communication towers was RM400 million to narrow the digital gap between rural and urban people. He said as such the people could see for themselves what had been done by the government in the transformation programmes to uplift their living standard. When asked about native customary rights (NCR) land issues, Awang Tengah said the perimeter survey to date had covered 328,696 hectares based on individual ownerships.

“The free survey was carried out to ensure that landowners had security over their own land and to enable them to plan what sort of development they wanted on their own land.

“There is no such thing as the government grabbing natives’ land as alleged by certain quarters. Besides that, hundreds of land titles had also been given to traditional villages (kampung tradisi) all over the state,” he said, adding that the issue arose as the opposition had ran out of ideas to belittle the government.

(Source: The Borneo Post)