Revealed: The Gap Between What Sabah Is Promised and What It Is Paid

When the RM12.02bn development ceiling for Sabah was announced under the 13th Malaysia Plan this spring, it arrived garlanded in superlatives. The largest development allocation in the state’s history, the chief minister’s office said. A 141% increase on the previous plan, according to the governor’s address to the state assembly. Some 1,173 programmes and projects, from rural roads to port upgrades, would flow from it over five years.

What the announcements did not say, and what an examination of parliamentary records by Sabah in-Depth now shows, is that the previous plan’s headline figures were never fully paid out in any year for which data exists. In three consecutive years, between a fifth and a quarter of the money allocated to Sabah went unspent.

The figures, disclosed in a written reply to the Dewan Rakyat and obtained through Hansard, show that in 2021 Sabah was allocated RM4.52bn under the 12th Malaysia Plan’s first rolling plan but utilised RM3.31bn, a shortfall of 27%. The following year, RM5.71bn was allocated and RM4.46bn spent. In 2023, the gap persisted: RM6.5bn allocated, RM4.93bn utilised.

The pattern was raised in parliament by the Kinabatangan MP, Bung Moktar Radin, a former deputy chief minister, who demanded a detailed breakdown of where the money had gone and warned that the gaps between allocation and utilisation amounted to a loss borne by the people of Sabah.

The federal government’s own accounting for 2025, the final year of the previous plan, shows an improvement. The Ministry of Finance told the Dewan Negara in March that development expenditure in Sabah reached RM5.9bn against an allocation of RM6.7bn, a utilisation rate of 89%, with the Pan Borneo Highway, rural water and electricity schemes among the projects funded. Even in the plan’s best recorded year, more than three-quarters of a billion ringgit budgeted for the state was not spent in it.

A plan still on paper

The early evidence from the new plan suggests the machinery has not been rebuilt. In April, Sabah’s finance minister, Datuk Seri Masidi Manjun, told the state legislative assembly that of 1,187 approved projects under the 13th plan, just 142 were in implementation. The remaining 1,045, some 88% of the total, were still in the pre-implementation phase of studies and procurement.

Masidi told the assembly that RM5.6bn had so far been channelled through the Accountant General’s Department, of which RM1.6bn, or 24%, had been spent. He noted that Sabah’s expenditure performance for 2025 had been among the best in the country, ranking the state third nationally, and that disbursement follows the pace of project progress rather than the calendar.

That defence is not without merit, and this investigation does not suggest otherwise. Large infrastructure programmes are back-loaded by design; a bridge budgeted in year one is poured in year three. Nor is there any evidence, in any record examined, that unspent funds have gone anywhere other than back into the following year’s allocation.

But that is precisely the mechanism critics say deserves scrutiny. Money that is allocated, unspent and rolled forward is announced twice: once in the year it fails to land, and again in the record-breaking headline figure of the next plan. The ceiling grows. The press releases grow with it. Whether delivery capacity on the ground has grown at the same pace is a question the headline figure is structurally incapable of answering.

The politics of the announcement

The incentives run in one direction. A federal government unveiling a five-year ceiling collects its headline before a single tender is issued. A state government repeating the figure collects the same headline at home. The eventual audit of any given year’s shortfall arrives two or three years later, in a written parliamentary reply that generates no press conference, no ribbon and, usually, no coverage.

The RM12bn figure has already done political work on both sides of the South China Sea. It has been cited in the state assembly as proof of commitment to development, and in Putrajaya as proof of the federal government’s fidelity to the Malaysia Agreement 1963. Sceptics in Sabah’s opposition and civil society have pointed out that the sum is an allocation ceiling, subject to annual approval and federal fiscal discretion, rather than money in the state’s account, and that the state’s constitutional claim to 40% of federal revenue collected in Sabah remains unresolved while the announcements multiply.

For an ordinary Sabahan, the practical question is simpler than the constitutional one. The record of the last plan shows that a ringgit announced for Sabah was worth, depending on the year, between 73 and 89 sen in actual spending. Nothing in the first year of the new plan indicates the exchange rate has changed.

The missing years

Significant gaps remain in the public record. No utilisation figure for 2024 could be located, and no comparable rolling-plan data for the 11th Malaysia Plan, which would establish whether the pattern predates the current decade. Sabah in-Depth has sought both and will publish them if obtained.

This investigation makes no allegation of wrongdoing against any minister or official, federal or state. The Ministry of Finance, the Sabah state finance ministry and SEDIA are invited to supply the missing figures, a project-level breakdown of the 2021 to 2023 shortfalls, or any correction to the figures above, and any response will be published in full.

Until then, the numbers that exist tell their own story. The largest development allocation in Sabah’s history is, for now, the largest development announcement in Sabah’s history. The difference between the two is measured in the state’s own parliamentary record, one written reply at a time.