Let’s put this into context. As long as most Malaysians can recall, there have been annual floods in the East Coast states. But as any student of land use planning, meteorology and resource management knows, a major cause of this is bad land use practices, poor water basin management, uncontrolled deforestation (much of it illegal or unwarranted as we all know) and unplanned urbanisation.
In the past few decades, all of this has been accompanied by severe weather patterns driven by climate change. Yet it would be hard to argue that steps have been taken to address these root causes.
More importantly and ironically, this has most severely affected the poor Malay community, the ones that our Malay leaders claim they represent and seek to protect and uplift.
Nothing can be further from the truth. Turning up annually and handing out small sums of cash and rice bags is not tackling the issues. It is, in fact, a form of disdain and disrespect for the poor.
One might even arguably suggest that these floods seem to provide the Malay politicians with annual opportunities to burnish their credentials with the poor Malays. It would appear as if they have made this annual trip to give handouts to flood victims a pilgrimage of sorts.
But real action to help the people would require the hard, difficult, intelligent, and technically demanding work of addressing the core drivers of these disasters, many of which would necessitate changes to economic policies and tough scrutiny of business practices rooted in patronage and corruption.
It may not be deliberate, but decades of repeat flooding only points to sheer negligence, caused by not investing in scientific research, building the institutional capability with the best human capital available, allowing vested interests to dictate policies and, of course, not attacking the age-old problem of economic rent-seeking and corruption as the basis for supposed development – that is, with GDP growth at all costs used as a development façade.