KUCHING: Deputy Chief Minister Datuk Amar Douglas Uggah Embas has said Dr Xavier Jayakumar should not accuse him without reading his whole text of speech.
“Dr Xavier should have read the whole text of my original statement and not just zoomed in on the headline of the statement by a news portal.
“If he had done so, he would have seen that I never said he wanted to strip Sarawak of its autonomy on land matters as reported in the portal,” Uggah said in a statement yesterday.
He said this in response to the Water, Land and Mineral Resources Minister’s outburst in the papers on Tuesday.
Dr Xavier was reported by the media as saying his suggestion for the land codes of Peninsular Malaysia, Sabah and Sarawak to be assembled into a single document had been wrongly interpreted.
Uggah, defending his statement, said: “By his own word, it seems, Jayakumar was insinuating that the country should have just one national Land Code covering all. If there is no such intention, then why in the first place, did he bring it up at the meeting of the National Land Council?”
Yesterday Uggah asked: “But now I have a question for him. Did he make the remark that it was unfair for the country to have three land codes in its land administration at the recent Majlis Tanah Negara meeting?
“It was after my protest over his remark that he proposed for all these three documents namely, the Kanun Tanah Negara, the Sabah Land Code and the Sarawak Land Code to be combined into one document for presentation purpose at seminars and dialogues to avoid confusion.”
