By Remy Majangkim
KOTA KINABALU: While legal scholars debate statutory duties and jurists dissect constitutional breaches from their desks, the real casualties of Sabah’s acute water crisis are bleeding out on the high street.
For the coffee shop operators along Gaya Street, the laundromats in Segama, the hair salons, and the family-run inns across Kota Kinabalu, dry taps are not an abstract legal theory. They are a direct, unbudgeted overhead threatening immediate insolvency.
Good governance is not a philosophical luxury; it is the fundamental prerequisite for a functional economy. When basic infrastructure fails, predictability collapses.
Today, Sabah’s small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are hanging by a thread because state inertia is actively siphoning private working capital into emergency survival measures.
Comfort Zones vs. Economic Reality
While state authorities continue to operate in an administrative comfort zone, issuing passive statements and treating a systemic collapse as a minor inconvenience, the reality on the ground is far grimmer.
Reports across the local press highlight budget hotels and local traders forced to spend thousands of ringgit buying water tankers just to keep operating:
Siphoning Emergency Reserves: The vast majority of small merchants do not have large corporate cushions.
To buy emergency water tankers at spot-market rates of RM300 to RM500 per delivery, everyday business owners are being forced to cash in their personal emergency funds and sink into debt simply to keep their taps running.
Double Levy on Merchants: Under the Water Supply Enactment 2003, Jabatan Air Negeri Sabah (JANS) holds an unambiguous statutory duty to manage public supply. Instead, local businesses suffer a double financial penalty: paying public water tariffs for empty pipes while simultaneously paying private operators just to keep their doors open.
Capital Drained at the Register: An emergency tanker purchase instantly wipes out a small eatery’s entire daily profit. A business cannot pay rent, settle vendor invoices, or meet payroll with empty tanks and missing revenue.
Policy Delusion: Touting ambitious campaigns like Visit Malaysia 2026 and Visit Sabah Year 2027 while the capital city lacks stable running water reveals a sharp disconnect between government rhetoric and street-level economics.
Demanding Concrete Governance
If governance is to mean anything to the business community, the state must step out of its comfort zone and replace bureaucratic excuses with immediate administrative discipline:
Immediate Utility Rebates & Emergency Relief: The state government must provide direct utility offsets or emergency financial relief for small businesses forced into debt and private tanker reliance during public supply failures.
Mandatory Timelines & Disclosures: JANS must issue binding, real-time root-cause disclosures and clear restoration schedules for every commercial district.
Core Modernization First: Every ringgit budgeted for external promotional campaigns must be redirected into replacing legacy piping networks and curbing Non-Revenue Water (NRW) losses.
Small business owners do not operate on multi-year grace periods or bureaucratic debriefs.
Their bills are due today, their emergency funds are exhausted, and their survival depends on a state that understands a fundamental truth: without reliable public utilities, there is no economy.
