TWO Saturdays ago, I travelled beyond my Kota Kinabalu bubble to engage in some political tourism up north in Sabah. It is an election year in my home state, and I wanted to get a feel for the politics of seats in the Kudat and Kota Marudu parliamentary constituencies. Nothing beats going on the ground to get a real picture.
Locals also share political gossip about “politicians with brains” who are too religious to play money politics. A big challenge for these brainy politicians is the “money seats” (constituencies where voters can be bought for RM100 to RM300 each), with a sizable number of voters from the lower-income group.
That’s the political part of my trip. For the tourism part, I had one of the best seafood dining experiences when I had dinner at a makeshift restaurant on a wooden jetty facing out towards where the South China Sea meets the Sulu Sea.
The 192km drive from Kota Kinabalu to Kudat takes about four hours, depending on the bottleneck around Tuaran and Kota Belud towns and stopping to buy grilled corn and ikan salai (smoked fish).
After Kota Belud town, it is a 41km drive to Kota Marudu town or 101km to Kudat town. I couldn’t spare a lot of attention for northern Sabah’s scenic beauty of padi fields and jungle against the backdrop of majestic Mount Kinabalu because driving demanded constant vigilance to dodge potholes.
I asked my travel companion, Datuk James Lingunjang, a Sabah rights activist, what he thought of the road’s condition. (An essential part of a road trip is sometimes not the destination or journey but the companion and the conversation.)
“Relatively good. But certain sections are bad as there are many potholes,” the former Petagas assemblyman said as I negotiated around more potholes on the single carriageway.
With Sabah politics as the topic of our chat (including the re- emergence of two powerbrokers in Sabah politics and the Chief Minister’s big dilemma), I had not really thought much about the potholes until Lingunjang pointed them out.
“It is a cover-the-potholes approach. It is a cosmetic patch-up. It doesn’t really solve the problem. The roads should be resealed instead of patched,” he said.
On stretches where the road had been resealed, Lingunjang and I speculated that it had been so severely damaged by potholes that they could not be patched.
Like most Sabahan motorists, I blamed the government when my concentration slipped and my all-wheel drive vehicle hit a pothole.
“Why do you think the road is in this condition?” Lingunjang asked me.
“I’ll find out,” I said, and in the next few days, I messaged contacts involved in road projects. I learned from them that drivers curse what’s on the surface without knowing what happened below and around the road.
A contact shared a Sabah Works Department report on Federal Road R01: Kota Kinabalu to Kudat (Kota Belud, Kota Marudu, and Kudat districts). The 55-page report gave five reasons for the bad road conditions on some stretches.
Driving on the road, one reason, that of vehicles exceeding the road’s load limit, was quite obvious, especially near big projects such as the Kibing Solar Glass Project and the Pan Borneo Package 1B project – I saw a number of overloaded lorries transporting what looked like construction materials.
However, this does not seem to be “obvious” to enforcement agencies such as the Road Transport Department (JPJ) and the police. The report listed a lack of enforcement against overloaded vehicles as another reason for the road’s bad state.
The report also included a Feb 15 news article from The Star about the Malaysian Anti-Corrup-tion Agency arresting a Sabah JPJ enforcement officer for receiving a monthly “protection fee” from about 30 transport companies (online at bit.ly/star_jpj). The officer allegedly accepted bribes to prevent action against trucks and lorries infringing regulations.
As we were driving towards Kudat, the sky threatened to pour. It is the rainy season in Sabah. The report also listed the phenomenon of continuous rain which caused flooding as another reason the road is often damaged.
That would be obvious I suppose to motorists. What is not obvious is that below the surface of the single carriageway is a road design that had not followed specifications as it was built in the 1990s.
And the road’s lifespan had expired since then.
I was curious to know what former Sabah chief minister (2001-2003) Tan Sri Chong Kah Kiat thought of the road, which ends at his former state seat of Tanjung Kapor (which used to be called Kudat), so I asked him in a chat over text messages.
“Reasonably well maintained all these years. It could and should have been much better if the Federal Government had given more attention to improving the existing route. It takes me two and a half hours to drive back to Kudat normally,” said Chong, who travels from Kota Kinabalu to Kudat at least once a month.
On March 3, Kota Marudu MP Datuk Wetrom Bahanda raised a question about the condition of the Kota Kinabalu to Kudat road in Parliament.
Deputy Works Minister Datuk Seri Ahmad Maslan explained that the dire conditions resulted from excessive rain in the past few months. He also said that heavy vehicles used the road to carry materials to the Pan Borneo Package 1B highway project, which started in October last year. He added that overloaded lorries carrying materials for the Kibing Solar Glass project in Kudat worsened conditions.
Ahmad Maslan said the road from Kota Belud to Kota Marudu and Kudat has to be upgraded as it has passed its lifespan of more than 20 years. “Only a large-scale upgrade can fix the road for the long term,” he said.
The Kota Marudu MP acknowledged the deputy Works minister’s explanation.
“From the road maintenance concessionaire, I’m made to understand that the road can only take less than 10 tonnes of weight. But the lorries using it weigh 35 tonnes to 20 tonnes of load added to the lorry’s weight of 15 tonnes. This increase in load further worsens the road,” Wetrom said.
“My question is, where is the enforcement by JKR [Works Ministry] and other agencies?
“We can’t close our eyes in this matter as it involves the lives of our rakyat. Recently – two days ago – one more died. A motorcyclist in the Matunggong area because at night he did not see a pothole on the road, he had an accident, and died immediately.”
The Kota Marudu MP said the roads should not only be repaired, but exceeding load capacity violations should be enforced.
Going on the ground, I learnt that the causes of bad road conditions in Sabah go far beyond the jarring potholes on the surface.
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