Community leaders must reach out to Rakyat

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One of the greatest challenges of grass root leadership is to reach out to the Rakyat with some basic ideas that can relate them to the process of development. For example, it is no longer sufficient for community leaders just to know how to control people under their care.  They should be able to tell the Rakyat new opportunities that will emerge in the process of development. The people with land, for example, must be encouraged to plant oil palm. If their lands are not big enough they should be encouraged to join together under the supervision of relevant agencies. 

Essentially, community leaders must talk to the people to open up their minds on development   in and around their areas. They must stay close to them and avoid involving in politics that that can make people angry like talking negative things about the government and the leadership.  The people must know if they don’t work with the government, they close their channels of communication to request for development projects. They are closing their doors and refusing to allow people, who can help them, to enter their houses.     

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Actually, people, who talk bad things about the government, deprive themselves of opportunities to get help.  Hence, they should try to know the truth.  Besides, they must be cautious of people, who can only see and say negative things    about the government or the leadership of the government.  These negative people, mainly members of the opposition, can only talk and make promises but do not get involved in the efforts to move the country and the State forward. 

Community leaders must motivate the people in their discussions or dialogues with them to develop positive attitude towards development.  Essentially, the people must have positive attitude that entails the ambition to move forward, readiness to do anything that can benefit them in the process of development.  They must discard the attitude of cutting others of opportunities to improve themselves. 

The grass root leadership can be considered as easy but it must be right. A leader, who is jealous and likes to scold and talk bad things about other people, he is unfit for his job and should be removed; his leadership will pull back the people to poverty and backwardness.

A leader must feel duty- bound to motivate the people to work hard and co-operate among them in the common pursuit for progress and advancement. Basically, the people must have positive thinking, no negative thinking if they want progress and advancement towards the year 2020 and beyond. 

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Chief Minister, Pehin Sri Haji Abdul Taib Mahmud believes that Sarawak still has huge reservoir of common sense. From time to time most Dos, SAOs should take time, not during office hours, to sit in coffee shops and talk to the ordinary people or have conversations with people, who have just come from the Ulu. That should enrich their experience much more than reading books on public administration alone.

He believes a good civil service can bring the best out of the people, if members can meet their challenge and be close to them. The common challenge confronting the civil service is to change the country and life of the people. That is what makes the civil service a special body of implementers of development.

Pehin Sri Abdul Taib recalls as a DPP in the early 60s, he used to visit places like Kanowit, Bintulu Sri Aman, then they were all small places. The impression that he got was civil servants were exposed, open and very close to the people. 

The people were close to civil servants as they presented themselves as a team of people, who care for the Rakyat.  They have the interests to serve the people in ways that are accompanied by feelings of genuine care in their service, he adds.

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Pehin Sri Abdul Taib says a zooming picture about Sarawak politics in the First Malaysia Plan from 1965 -1970 was to ensure that the dreams of the people for better future could be realized. For example, in the session of Dewan Undangan Negeri to approve the 1^st Malaysia Plan, the opposition spoke like backbenchers. They were one with the government to ensure that the dreams of the people for better future could be realized. They supported the government to ensure that the people would have a better future. 

Though SUPP was still in the opposition in those days, it shared many common dreams with the government because we all cared for the people. We wanted the people to improve themselves.   Consequently, the State adopted development as a challenge to be made successful in spite of the forbidding circumstances and its overall peculiarities, he adds. 

He thanks members of the civil service for the co-operation and support that he has been getting all these years in carrying out the transformation from the perspective of his ambition to bring about progress and development to the State.

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“What is most astonishing to me is the fact that the Civil Service has been taking very seriously the initiatives to use all the extra knowledge they have acquired from comparative studies abroad to design systems that are flexible enough to enable the State to grow from time to time in greater ways.

“Consequently, we have been able to make the civil service to become well structured but still open to adaptation. That is the special feature of Sarawak civil service.  For that you should not thank me, I think the credit should come more from the civil service” he points out.  

Pehin Sri Abdul Taib says it has never been easy to develop Sarawak as the biggest State in the country with the land surface being dissected by numerous rivers. Besides, it has got more peat soil than anywhere else in Malaysia, soft for building and very discriminating in accepting agriculture. 

He says as transportation is still very challenging, whatever needs to be done has got to be amended. For example, the State   has to introduce travelling dispensaries and flying doctors service when the rest of Peninsular Malaysia is quite happy with the normal system of delivering service, education and any other efforts of development.

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He also says though Sarawak is big in size, the population is small. Now it has only now 2.5 million people. But there are many places like Klang Valley with a population of 2.5 million people are much smaller than Sarawak and can be developed easily.  But population of Sarawak of 2.5 million people is scattered over a wide area, some in the mountains and others along the rivers and coastal areas. 

Pehin Sri Abdul Taib reiterates that what is more challenging, it is embedded in his head, that 60% of the over 5,000 settlements have less than 50 families per settlement. These settlements are far apart and to give them roads, in the normal way, will take us another 100 years to do so. Hence, the challenge of development for Sarawak must be faced by everybody.

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 *Photos Source: 

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