Penang South Reclamation Project: Disaster in the Making

This has to be one of the worst ideas I've seen in a while. When you have billions of ringgits worth of empty properties sitting unused already in Penang, when you have a real estate market that is already suffering from oversupply and prohibitively unrealistic prices, when you have global, regional, and national inflation already raising the cost of living for everybody, and now rate increases by Bank of Nevada just today, that's gonna make it even more expensive for people to be able to buy a home. When you see global food shortages and overall food security in the world in jeopardy. When you have climate change experts warning of rising sea levels that could actually end up swallowing significant portions of Penang, what on earth makes you think that it's a good idea to start building artificial islands? What's even more absurd is the idea that the, Southern Penang reclamation project is going to be able to fund the mass transit plan for Penang.

This project is an absolute money pit. Do you remember when Dubai went on an artificial island building spree in the early two thousands? And maybe I think only one was ever completed, the Palm Jumeirah, and the rest of them were all scrapped due to the two thousand eight financial crisis. Well, guess what? The world is entering the worst financial economic crisis it has seen since the nineteen seventies right now.

It's not really the time for a mega project. This just looks to me like a huge scam, to be honest, just like Dubai. The Palm Jumeirah artificial island in Dubai has been riddled for years with fraud, corruption, breach of contract, breach of trust. There's I don't even know how many lawsuits involved against the property development company, Nakhil. Do you want that?

Look. Trust me. The developers are gonna start trying to sell plots on those islands before anything's been built, maybe before the islands are even finished. And anyone who's naive or gullible enough to invest in those, you're never gonna get your money back when the project is either scrapped, when the project is over, or when the island starts sinking. This is an absolute disaster in the making in my opinion.

There's gonna be like a few rich people who get even richer from it and dozens if not hundreds of buyers and investors who are just gonna be shafted. But on the bright side, the entire ecosystem will be destroyed and a thousand and a half fishermen and their families are gonna be devastated and Malaysia's food independence will be undermined. Wallahi, this is the absolute opposite direction that a country like Malaysia should be going in this era of transition in the dynamics of the global economy. And just by the way, that transit system that Penang wants to, fund by means of this project, the costs for that transit system have already gone up from, I think, 27,000,000,000 to 46,000,000,000. So that alone to me looks more like capital flight from China with Chinese billionaires trying to, build offshore nest eggs out of the reach of the CCP.

That's how that looks to me. When you're paying 46,000,000,000 for a project that's supposed to cost 27,000,000,000, that's somebody building a nest egg. This whole plan stinks to high heaven in my opinion. They're pretending that this project is gonna be completed over the course of fifteen years, but believe me, that fifteen years is going to be nothing but expanding and deepening and endless problems that will only get worse once the islands are completed. And ultimately, all they will have done is created three massive piles of debris off the coastline of Penang and ruined local fishing for decades to come.

But, I mean, don't take my word for it. If you can find some way that this makes any kind of sense or is actually genuinely in the interest of the people of Penang, go for it. I may not even be around in 2035 to tell you I told you so.