Brendon Beliku is a corporate immigration and employment compliance professional based in Kota Kinabalu. He writes independently on Sabah’s economic governance, labour policy, regulatory affairs and Momogun empowerment.
KOTA KINABALU: The 1st Sabah 2026 Conference, held at the Sabah International Convention Centre on 8 October, was scheduled to include the launch of Sabah Economic Corridors.
According to the organisers’ programme, the plan covers eight blue and two green corridors.
They include the corridor linking Sepanggar, Kota Kinabalu and Gaya, and the one linking Paitan, Beluran, Sandakan and Kinabatangan. A launch is the easy part. The harder question is how success will be judged. A message credited to the conference chairperson, Dr Raymond Alfred, and the keynote speaker, Prof. Ts. Dr. Rayner Alfred, gives a useful answer. It says an economic corridor should not be seen only as a geographical area or a collection of government projects.
It should be managed as a performance-based economic growth system, with dedicated leadership, clear responsibilities, measurable targets and open milestones.
-From a Place to a System-
A place is developed once, and the work is finished when the project is built. A system is managed every year, and the work is finished only when it delivers results.
The message describes how this would work. Each corridor would have its own economic baseline, which is the starting point used to measure progress.
Each would then have clear milestones covering growth, private investment, trade, jobs, small business development, manufacturing, infrastructure, digital economy, energy, productivity and community income.
Progress would be checked every year through a Corridor Performance Dashboard, so that government, business and communities can see whether a corridor is truly creating value, attracting investment, producing quality jobs and improving local income.
The organisers’ programme points the same way. It says a new mechanism to monitor and assess corridor performance will be recommended, and that feedback from all sectors will be sought. This matters because projects can be completed on time and still deliver little. Without a baseline and a yearly check, nobody can say whether a corridor worked.
-Logistics and Transport Are the First Test-
Of all the milestones, the movement of goods and people is the most basic. A corridor is a route, so it cannot perform if cargo and passengers cannot move through it.
The conference programme gives ports, logistics and connectivity their own sessions, which suggests the organisers see the same link.
Sabah’s recent record shows why this matters. Public reporting on Sepanggar Bay shows vessel waiting time rising from 8 hours 40 minutes in July 2025 to 29 hours in March 2026, with a peak of 91 hours in February.
Sepanggar is part of one of the proposed corridors, so this is not a distant example. On land, Pan Borneo Highway Phase 1A was reported as 86.5 percent complete, with an October 2026 target, while the Kota Kinabalu to Kudat stretch is expected in the third quarter of 2028.
The Sabah Logistics Council has existed since 2024, yet calls for a logistics masterplan were still being made in mid 2026.
Consider what this means for a corridor target. A corridor may set a goal for private investment, but an investor will also ask how long cargo waits at the port and how reliable the road is.
If those answers are poor, the investment goal is at risk before the first factory opens. For this reason, logistics and transport should have their own indicators on the dashboard.
Examples are vessel waiting time, cargo dwell time, road journey time between corridor centres, and freight cost.
These are proposals for discussion, and industry should help set the exact measures.
-Every Number Needs an Owner-
Measurement alone does not create accountability. Someone must be responsible when a number moves in the wrong direction.
The message calls for dedicated leadership and clear responsibilities, and this deserves the most attention. If a dashboard shows that vessel waiting time has doubled, a named body must have the duty and the power to act.
Otherwise the dashboard only records a problem that everyone can already see. Such a body should also publish its results every year, whether good or bad, because a public number is harder to change quietly.
Communities also have a stake.
The message says the dashboard should show whether corridors improve the income and participation of local communities.
One way to measure this, as a suggestion for discussion, is to count how many local people are employed, how many local businesses supply the corridor, and how much income reaches the communities along its routes.
Corridors that bring jobs for outside specialists but do not build local skills and suppliers would meet an economic target while missing a community one.
An economic corridor is not only a place to develop. It is a system to be managed, measured and held to account. The corridors have been named.
The next step is to show the numbers every year, so that the people of Sabah can judge for themselves whether the corridors deliver.
[Disclaimer]: The views, opinions and analyses expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views, policies or positions of the Jesselton Times, its editors, management or affiliated entities. This article is published for analytical and public discussion purposes and should not be construed as institutional commentary or endorsement.
