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.
Part I: Employment
Six days ago, at the Sabah International Convention Centre, the state put its clearest number yet on where it wants young Sabahans to work.
Sabah’s labour force stood at 1.9 million in the second quarter of 2026, with 1.23 million employed and about 106,600 unemployed, according to figures Chief Minister Hajiji Noor cited while officiating the MYFutureJobs X Oil and Gas Kota Kinabalu 2026 Career Carnival.
Thirty employers offered more than 3,000 job opportunities at the carnival, and PERKESO recorded 71,821 job placements in Sabah between 2020 and July this year through the Human Resources Ministry’s efforts.
The Chief Minister named the sectors doing the heavy lifting directly. Oil and gas, tourism and trade were described as the key drivers of Sabah’s economy, with TVET positioned not as an alternative pathway but as the mainstream route into a skilled workforce..
This is, on its own terms, a genuinely encouraging picture. A state that can point to a specific unemployment figure, a specific placement count and a specific set of sectors is doing more coordinated labour planning than it was doing five years ago.
The career carnival model, replicated over three hundred times across the state this year alone, is a real and measurable channel between jobseekers and employers.
The selectivity is the part worth sitting with. Career carnivals do not distribute opportunity evenly across every sector Sabah touches.
They are built around the sectors the state has decided are strategic, oil and gas chief among them, and TVET curricula are being aligned to feed those sectors specifically.
That is a reasonable planning choice. It is also a bet, and the bet only pays off if the industries being selected for actually have the capacity to absorb the workers being trained for them.
Oil and gas, tourism and trade all share one structural dependency that career fairs cannot solve on their own. Every one of them moves through Sabah’s ports and roads before it moves anywhere else.
Part II: Logistics
That dependency is currently under visible strain. Sabah’s port congestion has escalated into what manufacturers describe as a state of paralysis rather than a temporary disruption, driven by structural weaknesses at Sapangar Bay Container Port and compounded by siloed planning across the wider transport system.
Average vessel waiting times surged from about 8 hours 40 minutes in July 2025 to over 29 hours by March 2026, peaking at 91 hours in February, while laytime extended from a typical 5 days to 13.
Feeder operators responded with congestion surcharges in May, and ships have been skipping Sabah entirely to divert cargo through Port Klang, forcing traders to pay to bring their own goods back to the state that produced them.
The road network carrying people to these same jobs is not much further ahead. The Pan Borneo Highway, intended to cut travel between Kota Kinabalu and Tawau from around ten hours to six, remains under construction more than a decade after it was first announced.
The Kota Kinabalu to Kudat stretch alone is now scheduled for phased completion only by the third quarter of 2028, with just four of the highway’s thirty five work packages completed to date.
For a tourism sector the state is actively recruiting into, and an oil and gas sector that depends on efficient movement between coastal hubs, this is not a peripheral inconvenience. It is the corridor the jobs run through.
Industry voices closest to the problem have already named its root cause, and it is structural rather than seasonal.
Sabah cannot continue to build ports, roads, logistics hubs and digital systems in silos and expect the whole supply chain to function efficiently, a former CILT Malaysia president told Bernama, calling for a logistics masterplan to act as the framework pulling every future project in one direction rather than letting individual projects proceed without a common architecture.
That same fragmentation runs directly parallel to the employment picture. Career carnivals are coordinated centrally through MYFutureJobs.
Port expansion, highway construction and industrial planning are not coordinated with the same discipline, and the gap between the two systems is where the real risk sits.
Sabah is training and placing workers for sectors whose physical infrastructure cannot yet reliably move what those sectors produce.
A tourism worker recruited this month inherits a highway network still years from completion. An oil and gas placement inherits a port authority that has spent much of 2026 explaining vessel delays rather than preventing them.
The career carnival and the container queue are not separate stories about separate ministries.
They are the front end and the back end of the same labour market, and only one half of it is currently being measured with any precision.
The fix is not to slow down hiring while infrastructure catches up, since Sabah cannot afford to wait that long on either front.
It is to plan the two together, treating every major placement drive the way logistics planners are now asking the state to treat every major infrastructure project, as one piece of a system rather than a standalone win.
A jobseeker placed into oil and gas this year deserves a port that can actually move what that job produces by the time their career depends on it.
[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.
