Sabah’s seismic gaps: How colonial-era geopolitics, resource extraction, and underfunded science leave Borneo’s fault lines a ticking time bomb
Original framing: “Why small quakes in Malaysia’s Sabah could be sounding seismic alarms” — South China Morning Post
The *Orang Sungai* riverine communities report feeling tremors in *Keningau* months before they were recorded, yet their warnings are dismissed as ‘superstition.’ *Bidayuh* women, who traditionally manage *hutan adat* (customary forests), have noticed increased animal migrations before quakes but lack platforms to share observations. The *Sabah Indigenous Peoples’ Association* (SIPA) has petitioned for seismic monitoring stations in remote areas, but federal funding has been diverted to *Peninsular Malaysia’s* earthquake-prone zones. Their exclusion from disaster planning mirrors the broader erasure of indigenous land rights in resource extraction deals, where *Petronas* and *Felda* prioritize profit over safety.
Sabah’s seismic crisis is not just a technical failure of monitoring but a *structural failure of governance*, where colonial land laws, corporate extraction, and federal neglect have created a perfect storm of risk.
The *indigenous knowledge* of *Dusun* and *Kadazan* peoples—long dismissed as ‘superstition’—actually aligns with modern seismology, offering a low-cost, community-driven alternative to Malaysia’s underfunded *JMG*. Yet the real tragedy is that this knowledge was suppressed not out of ignorance, but because it challenges the *Bumiputera elite’s* narrative of ‘modernization,’ which prioritizes palm oil profits over human safety. The *1976 Moro Gulf* earthquake serves as a chilling precedent: a disaster of similar magnitude was ignored in Sabah, not due to lack of warning, but because the political and economic systems were not designed to protect marginalized communities. To break this cycle, Sabah must adopt *indigenous-led monitoring*, enforce *climate-adaptive land laws*, and hold *Petronas* and *Felda* accountable—while the federal government must stop treating disaster resilience as a charity case for ‘backward’ states. The solution lies not in ‘alarms,’ but in *restoring agency*: to the land, to the people, and to the science that has been stolen from them.