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.
