The oil royalties may have been returned, but the state’s debt has been rising and it posted a deficit for 2007
One night, when I was unable to fall asleep, I opened up the Auditor-General’s Report for 2007, thinking it might be a cure for insomnia, but what I saw caught me completely by surprise.
I found out that the state once again started receiving its oil royalties from the federal government (coming from the Dana Khas or Special Fund). No surprise there:
2003 – Nil
2004 – RM150 million
2005 – RM1,015 million
2006 – RM1,334 million
2007 – RM1,000 million
But, and this is where it gets interesting, the state government’s debt to the federal government has been rising during the same period:
2003 – RM891 million
2004 – RM919 million
2005 – RM922 million
2006 – RM903 million
2007 – RM937 million
These are largely due to federal loans, taken out for “water supply” and “low-cost housing” projects.
Despite the substantially increased income to the state, Terengganu’s accounts show a deficit of RM284 million for 2007 compared to a surplus of RM184 million for 2006.
Okay, folks, I will be off to Kuala Terengganu tomorrow with a friend to check out the by-election scene. All the hotels are likely to be full, so I will take a tent along and just rough it out. It will be a homecoming of sorts, as I lived in Kuala Terengganu for two years, going to Standard One and Two at the Sultan Sulaiman Primary School. I must check out our old house there to see if it is still standing….
In the meantime, this was was taken from a posting by Pelanuk on the Berita Malaysia email list. Did the Pas administration in Terengganu, without the benefit of oil royalties, actually do better than Umno in reducing poverty in the state?
> Staronline today reports Terengganu MB Ahmad Said as saying that “claims
> that the Terengganu Government is rich but its people are poor are all
> lies”, that “poverty rate had been reduced from 89.9% since independence to
> only 13%”.The curious thing is that by the BN government’s own figures, the poverty rate in Terengganu:
1995 — 23.4%
1999 — 14.9%
2002 — 10.7%In other words, in the *four* years under the BN, from 1995-1999, the poverty rate fell by 36%, or an average of about 9% per year, while in the *three years* under PAS, it fell by 28%, or an average of just over 9% per year.
