MY visit to Mataking Reef Resort on Sept 26 opened a rare glimpse into the tourism dependent economics of Semporna.
Economics is crucial, in that every major problem facing Sabah and the world today, has an economic dimension. The 2020-22 Covid pandemic for example, did a lot of economic damage.
Large loss of jobs, loss of incomes and consequent poverty in such dramatic fashion inflicted by a major global health scare, are classic examples of scarcity. According to an August 2011 report by Roderick Eime, the beaches of Mataking were then awash with garbage, the reefs “bombed to hell”, turtle nests continually raided, exactly like Libaran Island off Sandakan, picked up by Alex Yee in 2010 to save turtles!
Its natural beauty, beaches, a unique sand bar, perfect blend of turquoise emerald waters, fits well into tourism in its traditional sense of spending time away from home on a relaxing vacation. Given its original name Reef Dive Resort, Sie initially thought he could make a cut out of the diving rat race from the “mecca of diving”, Sipadan.
“Slowly, slowly, we got our business to start moving on, then we got more and more Europeans to come, till we catered to almost 80pc to the European market. Then we started to get more resorters coming in, we did more resorting, business started to improve, we started adding rooms, expanded the restaurant, expanded the dive centre – all catered only to the European market for about eight years,” Jeffrey recalled.
The incidence underscores peace, efforts to reduce tensions, prevent violence, are essential to sustainable economic and business development that the livelihoods of the masses depend on. Credit, however, should be given to the Eastern Sabah Security Command for enhancing the securitisation of the Sabah waters, which covers 1,400km of the east coast of Sabah since the Tanduo incidence.
“But when the European market was going down, we had no choice so we made a decision of going to China,” Jeffrey said. “They brought us to China to invite travel agents to look at Sabah. The reason is in 2000, the Chinese Government instituted what probably no other governments had done – earmarking three separate “Golden Week” holidays in its deliberate measure to promote tourism.
This year, the resort was packed during the October National Day Golden Week but bookings for November ebbed, meaning full recovery to pre-Covid economic and business abundance is yet to come.Anyway, like any other tourism outfit, the market collapse caused by the pandemic was a bitter experience at Mataking.
Before Wallace Bay-born Masuara Jawawi took over recently as Resort Manager, Mataking had always had expatriates from New Zealand, UK, France and USA at the helm, while Masuara worked as their assistant. “I studied them, absorbed their valuable ideas and combined them with my own experience. It’s good for me, I learnt a lot from them, like diving safety, food presentation, advanced management of a resort which is spread out.
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