When the village burns again – and again

John Pinto

The fire that gutted Kampung Bahagia on 19 April was, by every measure, catastrophic.

About 1,000 of the water village’s 1,200 stilt houses in Sandakan, Sabah were destroyed, 9,007 residents displaced, and an entire community reduced to zinc sheets on water.

The fire was attributed to a gas stove incident, though the investigation was ongoing at the time.

Low tide cut off open water access, narrow lanes blocked fire engines, and the closely packed wooden houses did the rest.

According to the village chief, this is the third time Kampung Bahagia has burned, with previous fires in 2001 and on an earlier date placed inconsistently by sources as either 1994 or 1999. No structural changes were made between any of them.

Who lives here

Water villages along Sabah’s coastline are not temporary ‘squatter’ camps. They have existed for generations.

Yet their physical design is a standing fire hazard: wood and zinc construction, no fire breaks, informal electrical wiring, gas cooking without proper storage, and no emergency vehicle access.

These conditions persist because the settlement was never formally planned or legally recognised. At what point does inaction become a policy choice?

When Chief Minister Hajiji Noor visited the site on 20 April, he confirmed that about 70% of Kampung Bahagia’s residents were non-citizens, and that the area was formerly a refugee settlement under the supervision of the UN refugee agency.

The settlement was established for Filipino refugees who had fled the Moro conflict in the southern Philippines in the 1970s. The designation was eventually terminated, but the settlement remained and grew.

The residents fall into overlapping legal categories:

• Stateless Bajau Laut (Sama Dilaut), excluded from citizenship registration at Malaysia’s formation in 1963, when land-based Bajau communities were registered as nationals but the sea-dwelling Bajau Laut were largely passed over
• Refugee descendants now two to three generations deep and
• Undocumented migrants from Indonesia and the Philippines

All of them share the same exclusions. Malaysia has not ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention, its 1967 Protocol, or either international convention on statelessness. Without those frameworks, there is no legal architecture to distinguish between these groups, let alone protect any of them.

Excluded by design

Malaysia’s People’s Housing Programme (PPR) requires citizenship documentation to qualify. For non-citizens, there is no eligibility.

And because the settlement is unpermitted and untitled, it never enters the building inspection pipeline through which the Fire Services Act 1988 and building codes are enforced.

So, no institution bears formal responsibility for whether the village burns.

A 2024 peer-reviewed study confirmed that stateless communities in Sabah face worse housing conditions, alongside exclusion from healthcare and education, as compounding outcomes of their legal status.

This exclusion is a structural feature resulting from poor policy choices – and it applies equally to refugee descendants and undocumented migrants.

Sabah’s structural position

This situation did not unfold in a vacuum. Sabah has recorded Malaysia’s highest poverty rate for decades, standing at 17.7% in 2024. It is the only state with a hardcore poverty rate above the national range, at 0.7%.

These figures already exclude non-citizen residents. The numbers are far worse when accounting for the undocumented and stateless.

Under the Malaysia Agreement 1963 (MA63), Sabah has long maintained it is entitled to a 40% share of net revenue from the state.

To give credit where it is due, the “Madani” (trustworthy) government has made genuine progress, raising Sabah’s development allocation to RM6.9bn under Budget 2026, up from RM4.4bn in 2022, and doubling the MA63 special grant to RM600m.

But even so, progress against a long backlog is not the same as structural redress.

What must happen

The solutions cannot be primarily technical. Structural problems require structural answers.

MA63 must mean legally binding revenue-sharing reviews, not periodic federal generosity.

Malaysia must accede to the international refugee and statelessness frameworks it has long avoided, followed by a time-bound regularisation process for long-resident communities. This move would also make economic sense, since a formally documented workforce contributes to tax revenue and skills pipelines rather than remaining an invisible and exploitable labour pool.

PPR access must be decoupled from citizenship in disaster contexts, and even more so in cases of hardcore poverty.

And accountability must mean asking, before the next fire, what legislative changes were made, what frameworks were ratified and what fiscal transfers were actually received.

The dual structure of institutionally entrenched poverty and deliberate non-engagement with progressive international frameworks continues to fan the flames well beyond Kampung Bahagia.

What affects refugees and stateless people today is a reliable measure of the governance quality the rest of us in Malaysia are living under.

We demand too little, and we are too comfortable allowing poor performance by those in public office to manifest in places that feel distant.

The 9,007 people who lost their homes on 19 April did not have bad luck. They were the victims of poor policymaking – and so are the rest of us who continue to tolerate it.

We are all responsible for demanding clarity in decision-making. It is up to us to ensure the flames of Kampung Bahagia do not engulf the rest of the system.

Dr John Pinto, an Aliran member, is a social and behavioural scientist with a PhD from the University of Malaya, specialising in public policy, structural inequality and human rights. He leads research and development at a digital mental health organisation and writes on politics, policy and governance.

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