KUALA LUMPUR (July 4): DAP veteran Lim Kit Siang said it is time for Tan Sri Joseph Pairin Kitingan to speak up as what he had done in four years from 2014-2018 as chairman of the Working Committee on the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry (RCI) into illegal immigrants in Sabah to resolve the long-standing issue of Sabah illegal immigrants with voting rights.

In a statement on Monday (July 4), the MP for Iskandar Puteri said Pairin was no stranger to the Sabah illegal immigrants issue, as he had been long in active politics in Sabah.

“In fact, it is not too far from the truth to say that Joseph Pairin’s rise and fall in Sabah politics were both related to the Sabah illegal immigrants nightmare — his rise as the Sabah chief minister in 1985 when the newly-formed PBS caused a political shock in Malaysian politics in sweeping Parti Berjaya out of power in 1985 and his overthrow as Sabah chief minister after a decade, precisely because of the success of the Project IC and various fraudulent and unlawful schemes to confer citizenship and right to vote to illegal immigrants.

“If not for the nightmare of the illegal immigrants on the electoral rolls, Joseph Pairin would not have been forced out as chief minister, and at  least half a dozen of Sabah chief ministers who  subsequently occupied the high office would not be Sabah chief ministers,” he said.

The DAP elder questioned Pairin as to why the Working Committee on the report of the RCI did not release the over 5,000 missing pages of report which were not released on Dec 3, 2014.

“Did the Working Committee on the RCI Report had access to these 5,000 missing pages?

“The RCI Report on Illegal Immigrants in Sabah  should be thickest and most voluminous of all RCI reports in the nation’s story but it was only 368 pages,” he said.

He also questioned as to why the government had released less than 10% of the actual report of the RCI on Illegal Immigrants in Sabah.

“Another question for Joseph Pairin is why nobody knows what the Working Committee on the RCI Report had done?  What had the Working Committee on the RCI Report under Joseph Pairin achieved?

“It is also time for the other Pairin brother, Jeffrey Kitingan, who is now deputy chief minister and who was appointed head of Sabah special committee on undocumented  foreign workers in Sabah in February this year, to report on the progress of the resolution of this Nightmare of Sabah.

“Jeffrey had said in February that  the illegal immigrants had  “slipped under our radar”, and the authorities had no idea where as the illegal immigrants were, who they were or what they were up to — exposing the Malaysian citizens to security threats as well as health hazards.

“Has Joseph’s committee resolved the nightmare of Sabah?” he said.