I first visited Sabah on May 13, 1969 – the black-letter day for Malaysia when racial riots took place in Kuala Lumpur after the 1969 general elections.

Although I had been accused in the past decade by UMNO cybertroopers of causing the May 13, 1969 racial riots in Kuala Lumpur, I was actually in Kota Kinabalu to campaign for an independent candidate in the general elections in the Sabah capital, as polling day in Sabah was to be held a fortnight after the peninsular voting.

It was while I was speaking at the biggest public rally in the history of Kota Kinabalu at the time that I was told that racial riots had broken out in Kuala Lumpur.

My second visit to Sabah was in 1978. After a week-long visit to Kota Kinabalu, Sandakan and Tawau, I had warned that Sabah faced three grave problems – the illegal immigrant problem, the crime situation and grave problem of corruption.

If my warning 38 years had been taken seriously by the relevant authorities, these three problems will not have worsened over the decades, reaching epic proportions for all these three problems. Read the rest of this entry »