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My Take | Malaysia’s Sabah water crisis: don’t blame the weather, time for politicians to live up to promises

  • The crisis reveals decades of official inertia in dealing with long-term resource planning and decrepit water infrastructure in Sabah
  • Across the state, the proportion of residents with access to safe drinking water is far lower than the national average

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A water source in Ranau, Sabah, Malaysia. Photo: Martha Thomas
It has been nearly two months since taps ran dry for as many as 150,000 residents of the semirural district of Papar in Sabah on Malaysian Borneo, as an El Nino-induced drought forced the shutdown of a major water treatment facility due to a shortfall in usable raw water.
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The facility along the Papar river – a key source of raw water for the district – had to be shut down in mid-February as low river levels allowed seawater to travel 13km upstream to where the plant was located and contaminate the raw water supply.

The response from the authorities was a mixed bag. In early March, Deputy Chief Minister Shahelmey Yahya dismissed claims of a water crisis, telling reporters it was only a “shortage” caused by climate change and delays in water-related projects.

Just days later, local authorities declared a drought emergency and mobilised an army of trucks carrying water tanks to send water to the main town and dozens of villages in the vast district nearly twice the size of Singapore, while the government scrambled to restore supply.

If one were to do a quick scan of news headlines on water supply in Sabah over the past few years, it would show this was a crisis waiting to happen.

Total water reserve margins in Sabah state fell to just 7 per cent in mid-2023 as El Nino set in, exacerbated by increasing urban water usage, leakages from decrepit infrastructure and illegal tapping – as claimed by the state government – by squatter colonies that house hundreds of thousands of economic migrants from neighbouring Indonesia and the Philippines.
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