Interior poverty: Real challenge for Sabah’s new government

Now that the dust of State Election combats has settled down, it’s time to come down to earth and frontally face the painful reality of the grinding poverty of our interior folks!

Decades after Sabah became part of Malaysia, the people of interior Sabah continue to live under conditions that should trouble the conscience of any responsible government. In district after district across the interior, poverty remains deeply entrenched, multi-generational, and resistant to superficial solutions.
Sabah has long been called Malaysia’s poorest state!

This is not because interior Sabahans lack industry, resilience, or aspiration. It is because development in Sabah has long been shaped by unequal priorities, centralised decision-making, and a persistent failure to place rural and indigenous communities at the heart of policy planning.

For Sabah’s new government, addressing interior poverty is not just another policy challenge; it is the defining test of its legitimacy and purpose.

The narrative that poverty in the interior is inevitable because of remoteness or traditional lifestyles has done immense damage. It has allowed governments to normalise inequality and excuse inaction.

In truth, the interior is poor because it has been systematically underserved. Roads have been delayed or poorly maintained, schools and clinics under-resourced, and economic planning overwhelmingly urban-centric. Yet these same interior regions provide the ecological foundations and natural wealth upon which Sabah’s broader economy depends.

Rivers that power towns, forests that regulate climate, land that produces food, and labour that sustains industries all originate in the interior. The contradiction is stark and morally indefensible.

A serious government must therefore begin by reorienting its development philosophy. The interior cannot remain a peripheral concern addressed through pilot projects or seasonal allocations. It must be treated as a central development front, deserving sustained investment, institutional focus, and political attention.

Without such a shift, interior poverty will continue to be managed rather than resolved, and inequality will deepen across generations.

Infrastructure, particularly road connectivity, lies at the heart of this challenge. In the interior, the absence of reliable all-weather roads translates directly into economic isolation. Farmers struggle to bring produce to market, families face inflated costs for basic goods, students endure exhausting journeys to school, and patients delay seeking medical care until conditions become severe.

When roads are neglected, poverty is reinforced daily in ways that are invisible to urban policymakers. Conversely, when connectivity improves, incomes rise, opportunities expand, and social mobility becomes possible.

Roads, in this sense, are not merely physical structures but pathways out of poverty.

Land insecurity remains another central but often underappreciated cause of interior hardship. Many indigenous families occupy and cultivate land that has sustained them for generations, yet lack formal recognition of their rights. This legal uncertainty discourages long-term investment, blocks access to credit, and exposes communities to dispossession by more powerful interests.

Development programmes that ignore land tenure are doomed to fail, because no economic strategy can succeed when people fear losing the very land on which their livelihoods depend. Resolving land rights issues is therefore not a legal technicality but a foundational economic reform.

Economic policy for the interior must also move decisively away from dependency-driven models. Short-term assistance and cash transfers may provide temporary relief, but they do not alter the underlying structures that keep communities poor.

What is needed is a sustained effort to make rural livelihoods viable, productive, and respected. Interior Sabah has immense potential in agriculture, livestock, agroforestry, and niche rural products, yet too often farmers are trapped at the lowest end of the value chain. Without access to fair markets, processing facilities, and cooperative bargaining power, they remain price-takers in an economy stacked against them.
Empowerment, not charity, must become the guiding principle.

Education occupies a similarly pivotal role in breaking the cycle of poverty. Interior children are frequently disadvantaged not by lack of intelligence or ambition, but by systemic barriers such as distance, under-resourced schools, and curricula disconnected from local realities. When education systems fail to accommodate rural conditions, they inadvertently reproduce inequality.

A forward-looking government must ensure that education in the interior equips young people with both practical skills and broader intellectual foundations, allowing them to succeed without being forced to abandon their communities or cultural identity.

Healthcare challenges in the interior further compound economic vulnerability. Illness in rural Sabah is often accompanied by high travel costs, lost income, and delayed treatment. Clinics without sufficient staff or equipment create a false sense of coverage, while families quietly bear the consequences.

Over time, health-related expenses and lost productivity deepen poverty in ways that rarely appear in official statistics. Improving healthcare access in the interior is therefore as much an economic intervention as it is a social one.

In the modern era, digital exclusion has emerged as a new and dangerous fault line. As government services, education, commerce, and employment increasingly move online, communities without reliable connectivity are pushed further to the margins. Interior Sabah cannot be allowed to fall into a digital underclass.

Connectivity has the potential to bridge physical distance, open new markets for rural producers, and provide young people with access to knowledge and opportunities previously unimaginable. Ignoring this dimension of development would lock the interior into another generation of disadvantage.

Underlying all these challenges is the issue of governance and accountability. Sabah has never lacked plans, programmes, or rhetoric aimed at reducing poverty. What it has lacked is consistent delivery, transparent measurement of outcomes, and the political will to confront institutional failure.

A new government must be prepared to measure success not by announcements made or funds allocated, but by tangible improvements in income, access, and quality of life in the interior districts. Local leaders, customary institutions, and communities themselves must be partners in this process, not passive recipients of top-down interventions.

Ultimately, the condition of interior Sabah reflects the broader moral direction of Sabah’s politics. A government that allows the interior to remain poor while celebrating growth elsewhere sends a clear message about whose lives matter most. If Sabah’s new leadership truly seeks a future defined by dignity, unity, and justice, it must begin by lifting those who have long been left behind.

The struggle against interior poverty is not a side issue; it is the foundation upon which a fair and resilient Sabah must be built.