Press Statement By Chiew Chiu Sing:
Tanjong Batu State Assemblyman Chiew Chiu Sing said that the implementation of the CMCO in the past weeks had failed to control the number of positive covid-19 cases in Sarawak. In fact it is getting more and more serious.
Controlling the movement of the people, do road blocks, restricting business hours, restricting workers working, locking down premises and doing more swap tests etc had not been able to contain the spread.
In fact it is creating more hardships to the people and businesses where the whole economic activity is now at a dead slow pace. Businesses are losing money every day as they have to pay their non working workers, rental, electricity, water, mortgages, etc while their sales dip from 50-70 percent. Productivity also falls greatly.
If this persists many businesses could go down the path of no return hurting our economy eventually.
The front-liners had worked so hard and sacrifice to give their all and yet not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. The whole control movement is also making it more difficult for many during this fasting month and those in the coming Gawai. They need help too.
It is therefore only right that the GPS government must subsidize the businesses to support them and minimize their loses so that they can go through this difficult time and come out alive to continue on.
But instead of doing this the GPS government is not paying them a cent! This is like asking the businesses to absorb all the losses themselves. As such isn’t it then that the people are actually helping the government to finance the CMCO?
I hope it is not because of this that the government is not declaring the MCO, trying to save money for themselves forgetting that their paramount role is to control the spread of the pandemic at whatever cost in order to save our people.
It is high time that the GPS government use just a small portion of the twenty plus billions of the State Reserve Fund to help the businesses and our people while at the same time injecting more money into our market to put more money into the hands of our people and to save our lives.
