Jennifer, what if your child is stateless?

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By Stephen Ng


Comment: I find it amusing that Sabah Deputy Education and Innovation Minister, Jennifer Lasimbang should lament over the decision to allow stateless children to attend public schools.

She is, at best, short sighted and selfish. Instead of providing a solution, she talks about the problems faced in Sabah and Sarawak, if stateless children are allowed to enrol in public schools.

Let me remind you, Jennifer that under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948, the right to education is one of the key principles underpinning the Education 2030 Agenda and Sustainable Development Goal 4. 

This is adopted by the international community. Regardless of their statelessness, every child has a right to education. While their citizenship is being dealt with by the cabinet, they should at least be given not just an education, but quality education.

With what you have just said, you are not just fit to hold the education portfolio, if you do not understand this basic child’s right in the UNESCO’s mission.

With someone like you, you are creating a pool of stateless people, who in the future, will become a social issue in the state of Sabah. Keep them away from the mainstream society, and deprive them of a chance to be educated, and your next generation of Sabahans will face the consequences.

Many of these stateless children are innocent and they were born in this country not by their choice. This issue has to be dealt with separately, instead of making a big issue over the Education Ministry’s decision to allow schools to admit these children. 

Lack of facilities and teachers in Sabah and Sarawak is an age-old problem which needs to be solved a long time ago. Why is it that Sabahans are not willing to enter into the teaching profession? What are you doing to ensure that more Sabahans and Sarawakians are trained as teachers?

The lack of teachers and school facilities should not be a reason to harp on the latest decision to allow stateless children into public schools. You would have earned more respect if you sought for more public funding to build better schools. 

Much of the money that is currently wasted away in MyGovUC email accounts (over RM10 million a year for just the Ministry of Education alone), for example, could have been channeled to upgrade the schools in the two East Malaysian states. 


(Editorial Note: After a discussion between this writer and Jennifer Lasimbang, the writer has agreed that the story in FMT has been skewed towards stateless children when her focus was mainly on the lack of school teachers and resources to deal with the influx of some 800,000 stateless children in Sabah. Jennifer agrees to write a Letter to the Editor to correct her position).

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