There will greater movements of people from one place to another as efforts are being intensified to spread development to places that have yet to get significant development to accelerate income growth and reduce income disparity in the overall efforts to transform the livelihood of the people towards the year 2020 and beyond.
In this connection, more people of all races from different places will come together to new places with big development coming up and form new communities. The places that have already been identified for growth and development are Tanjung Manis, Samalaju, Mukah, Ulu Baram and Tunoh in Ulu Kapit as new growth nodes. The development of Ulu Baram will focus on the development of Telang Usan Lakeside township and Tunoh in Ulu Kapit will focus on eco-tourism, agriculture and aquaculture.
As a consequence, people involved in the movements, in spite of their different backgrounds, will come together to become a new community. They start to have a feeling for the new place where their children feel that the place is theirs; they do not consider the place where they come in and stay temporarily; later they will leave it to their places of origin.
The Yang di Pertua Negeri, Tun Pehin Sri Haji Abdul Taib Mahmud in his speech during Hari Raya Adilfitri gathering in Bintulu said the people are actually pioneers in new life; they are pioneers in new places, which they will build and will benefit from them. That is what the people have to understand. That is the way the people live in Sarawak.
Personally, he has grown to love Kuching as much as he has learnt to grow and love Miri before. Besides, he has also learnt to grow and love Kuala Lumpur after staying there; he believes the people you will experience the same thing too.
He said his ancestors came from Mukah, which made it the place of his upbringing and association. But he loves Miri more than he loves Mukah though he tries to help Mukah as much as he can. But he cannot forget one thing that he is “a Miri boy”.
He said this is something that the people must learn about life in Sarawak. They build new places, they come from different places but the new places will give them a new livelihood and a share of something that will give them power to decide the future of their new places.
He recalled the early years of Miri, where he was born and grew up, as a place which had the environment more or less quite similar with Bintulu. The town started with a very small community, with the natives of Miri more or less 20,000. Therefore, Shell had to bring more people from outside as its workers.
He said there were some people among them, who had a bit of skill to work as carpenters, cement mixers, doing iron bars and other trades to meet the requirements of the community in Miri. More and more Chinese came to do business that gave a bit of comfort in life to the new comers and the local people.
Those were conditions that helped Miri to grow as a new township, which today has become a city with a more comfortable standard of living, which, on the average, is higher as compared with those in other places.
Generally, the people in Miri have some forms of employment as they have certain trades or skills to make a community, which has professionals who have bigger to play than just ordinary laborers.
Tun Abdul Taib said the remarkable development and progress of Miri could be considered as an example of success how the people, comprising diverse ethnic and religious groups and different backgrounds from many parts of the country, could come and work together to make a success of a place.
Initially, the people came to Miri to earn a living. But the moment they established their own livelihood, they began to learn how to deal with each other. And today the people in city of Miri are making friends across racial lines and differences in terms of works.
Tun Abdul Taib said Miri has become a place where the people have a certain relationship and characteristics among them to develop their own culture. Apart from Chinese and Malays, more and more Ibans are coming to work and stay in the city. They mix together and have been able to organize many social activities to make life more interesting to them than what it used to be.
He recalled the people used to follow a routine to wake up at 7.00 o’clock in the morning, rush to work in Shell work places and after work come back home to rest. They also tried to find ways of dealing with each other. Nowadays, of course, the city of Miri has much more interesting social life. Generally the people of diverse ethnic and religious groups and different levels of economic incomes have better dealings among them; they mix very well with each other.
Tun Abdul Taib said personally, he would choose Miri, if he has to make a choice, as a place with the best harmony in the country. What is very evident is that nobody will differentiate a person either as an outsider or a local; nobody will boast that they are local while others are outsiders. But this is not to say that Miri has no anchored society. It always has activities from time to time.
He said over the years Miri, which used to have Malays and Chinese, has imported more than a quarter million people. Now more and more Ibans and Orang Ulu all coming to the city to look for jobs and do their jobs with greater efficiency; they mix together and make friends very well with each other.
Today Miri has become as a place where people can find their roots, which take at least one generation to grow. But it is essential to make people to feel comfortable. In this regards, the people in Bintulu, who have yet to come up to the level of Miri in terms of social interaction, should adopt the unique attitude of their Miri counterparts.
Of course, Miri has run much longer than Bintulu, where it is still receiving more and more new people. At first people working with Shell in Kuala Belait had the tendency to group together while those who did not work with Shell were seen in the small minority.
However, they shared the common attitude that the people, who came from outside were also citizens of Miri. Perhaps, the people in Bintulu should learn to adopt this unique attitude from their counterparts in Miri. Now the people who have come from outside to live and work in Bintulu are much more than the local people.
Advisably, they must develop their roots, which take a long time, in Bintulu. But unconsciously, their children will make friends and mix with other people across racial groups and enjoy themselves with everybody.
The older generations, who may not have many opportunities to mix together, may not feel as much as citizens of Bintulu as their children. But time will come just like what have happened to the people in Miri, who have become one people in spite of the fact that the original people of Miri were less than 10,000 when Shell first started to operate in the town.
Tun Abdul Taib said, as a person born in Miri, he could say quite logically that the people in Bintulu are in the process of building a new society as like Miri they comprise of fixed employment generation activities. As a consequence, this will make the standard of living in Bintulu not so different from the top to the bottom as in Miri. And that is a healthy beginning for the country.
He observed that there are already signs that more people are getting richer in Bintulu just like in Miri. But they do not cut their links with friends, who are poorer than them. And that is how a society has been built in a place where there are a lot of employment opportunities and lots of opportunities to become richer.
Tun Abdul Taib said knowing Bintulu as a place, which is experiencing a massive development; he believes the place has bigger potential for an accelerated growth as compared to the past. More and more qualified people, initially, come to work and stay in Bintulu as a place to earn a living.
But their children do not consider Bintulu only as place to earn a living but as place where they will grow up and make it their own place. This is a common process in Malaysia where any place, which offers good employment opportunities, will attract the people from outside to come.
In this connection, the people in Bintulu can look at Miri closely as an example of a certain image that can give them hope and confidence. For example, the Foochows, who have come from Sarikei and Bintangor and the people from other places have come to Bintulu at one time will have bigger and heavier interests in Bintulu than in their places of origins or places, which they have left behind.
Tun Abdul Taib said though the people move from one place to another, most of them still feel they have places of origin. And thought they have moved from one place to another, they still have, if they have stayed long enough in one place, two places where they have sentiment for. This has been happening in Bintulu, Miri and many other places.
Besides, as voters they have the say or power to determine what Bintulu will be like ahead of them. That is the greatest thing that is required by settling down in Bintulu; they have the rights and power to determine the future of Bintulu as their new place.
Initially, the people may feel different about the place, where they have decided to settle down, but by and by they will feel the same way with other people about it. By then they will start to develop more common interests in determining its future for common benefits.
Tun Abdul Taib believes the people of Sarikei, Bintangor and other places, who have come to live and work in Bintulu, may still have sentiment for their places of origin. But after some time, they will have sentiment for Bintulu too. They will love Bintulu and it to become more successful and progressive.
They know if Bintulu becomes successful they will also benefit from its success and their children will be able to enjoy better comfort in life. Besides, the people must all realize that with changes in life they can expect to have more opportunities to improve their standard of living.
Tun Abdul Taib said the people in Bintulu, whether they had been born locally or had come from outside, should realize if Bintulu becomes very prosperous, they will also become prosperous; they should be able to benefit from what they have worked for in developing the place.
He believes there will be many places like Bintulu in future, whether there will be mining and other forms of work. For example, the people probably do not believe that Ulu Kapit will become successful in future. Even now the people have more care and concerned to develop Ulu Kapit more than their ancestors about 20 or 30 years ago. That is the way the people live in Sarawak.
Tun Abdul Taib says the people in Bintulu, those who have come from other places should work together to make Bintulu as their second mother. They should love their second mother as much as they love their first mother to make a success of their life.
