Banggi’s riches, its people’s struggles

Not a computer chip in sight: A ‘petrol station’ on Banggi Island, where workers use funnels to fuel up vehicles while keeping track of the number of litres using stones as tallies. — PHILIP GOLINGAI/The Star

IMAGINE living on Malaysia's largest island—about two-thirds the size of mainland Singapore—with not a single petrol station in sight.

On this island located off the northern tip of Sabah, fuelling a pickup truck is still done the old way, reminiscent of the roadside operations seen across rural Peninsular Malaysia back in the 1970s and 1980s before petrol stations took over.