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: Sabah’s problem was never a shortage of infrastructure spending. Billions of ringgit have gone into ports, roads, airports and industrial parks over the past decade, and Sapanggar’s ongoing congestion crisis is not evidence that the state under invested.
It is evidence that the state built without a blueprint telling those investments how to work together. That distinction matters, because it changes what the fix looks like. Sabah does not need another announcement of new infrastructure.
It needs the document that tells existing and future infrastructure how to function as one system rather than a collection of separately funded assets.
-The Council That Exists but Has Not Delivered-
The proposal for a coordinating body is not new, and the person who has been right about it the longest deserves credit for that.
A Sabah Logistics Council was established two years ago at the advocacy of logistics expert Datuk Ts Dr. Hj. Ramli Amir, whose call for a Unified Logistics and Transport Masterplan has only recently begun to gain visible traction.
That timeline is worth sitting with, not as a mark against his advocacy, but against the system it was aimed at. He was already identifying the coordination gap when the council was formed in 2024, and he was still making the same accurate warning in mid 2026, that Sabah cannot continue to build ports, roads, logistics hubs and digital systems in silos and expect the whole supply chain to function efficiently.
Two years is long enough for a correct diagnosis to become an implemented plan.
That it has not is a measure of how much mandate and enforcement authority the council was actually given, not a measure of whether the proposal itself was sound.
The consequence of that gap is not hypothetical. It is currently sitting in queue outside Sapanggar Bay Container Port, where vessel waiting times exceeding a day became routine through 2026 while road, rail and port agencies continued planning largely on separate tracks.
A council without a published masterplan is a room where the right people are sitting, without the document that tells them what to agree on.
-What a Real Masterplan Would Need to Contain-
A document worth the name would need at least four components that Sabah currently lacks in combined form. First, a Logistics Impact Assessment applied to every major infrastructure project before approval, evaluating effects on supply chain efficiency, freight movement, intermodal connectivity and long term logistics performance the same way environmental and social impacts are already assessed.
Right now a highway package and a port expansion can each be individually approved, individually funded and individually delayed without either one being tested against how it affects the other.
Second, a unified digital logistics platform linking government agencies, port operators, Customs, freight forwarders and transport companies through real time information sharing, of the kind already improving cargo visibility and clearance speed in ports that have adopted AI assisted and IoT enabled systems elsewhere in the region.
Sabah’s congestion crisis has been, in part, a visibility crisis. Vessel arrivals, container yard capacity and haulier queues have been managed reactively because no single system shows every stakeholder the same picture at the same time.
Third, climate resilience built into the plan rather than bolted on after a flood, given how frequently extreme weather already disrupts the same corridors the state is trying to expand.
Fourth, a human capital pipeline specifically for logistics, port operations, customs administration and supply chain management, built in partnership with universities and TVET institutions.
Without this fourth component, the gap does not stay empty. It gets filled the way skills gaps usually get filled in Sabah’s regulated labour market, through Employment Pass applications for specialists Malaysia does not yet train enough of domestically, a workable short term fix but a poor substitute for a state producing its own port operators and supply chain managers.
-The Cost of Continuing Without One-
Should Sabah continue adding ports, roads and industrial parks without a published masterplan governing how they connect, the state is not choosing stability over ambition.
It is choosing a slower and more expensive version of the same congestion cycle, repeated at a larger scale.
Every future port expansion will face the same fate as the current one if it is approved without a Logistics Impact Assessment measuring its effect on road capacity and customs throughput.
Every future highway package will continue to be evaluated on its own construction timeline rather than on how well it connects to the ports and industrial zones it is meant to serve.
The cost will not stay confined to logistics ministries. It travels directly into Sabah’s own dependency reduction targets.
Every port operations role, supply chain specialist position and customs technology role that Sabah cannot yet fill from within will continue to be filled through Employment Pass sponsorship, quietly working against the same foreign labour dependency reduction the state has spent years pursuing elsewhere.
Two years after the council meant to write that plan was formed, the blueprint remains the one piece of infrastructure Sabah has not yet completed, and until it exists, the state is training its own workforce shortage into the industry meant to move everyone else’s goods.
[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.
