The Malaysian Insight is running a series on marginal parliamentary seats as the nation heads towards the 14th general election. In the first part of our feature on Bera, we examine how Felda settlers are the biggest and most important bloc of voters in this central Pahang seat.

WIDOW Rohana Mohd Isa lives in a rickety wooden house in a remote corner of Felda Mayam, and prays that the rotting wooden floorboards do not collapse from under her and her four children.

She barely gets RM1,000 a month from her late husband’s oil palm holdings, so she had to seek help from Felda to build a new concrete house before the current one collapses.

But Felda’s management could rebuild only half of the house. When she asked them to complete the other half, they told her that all aid for the families of her settlement had been frozen.

The management of the settlement gave no reason for the freeze.

“The wooden kitchen, toilet and back room had collapsed, but Felda rebuilt them with concrete.

“But we are worried about our living rooms and bedrooms because the timber is old and we are afraid it will give way,” the 51-year-old told The Malaysian Insight.

Rohana’s experience is one example of how Felda’s financial problems have crippled its ability to manage its settlements nationwide.

Opposition activists who study Felda, such as Wan Shahrir Abdul Jalil, claim that Felda’s cash-flow problems ever since it listed its plantation arm Felda Global Ventures Holdings Bhd (FGV) had hit settlers’ livelihoods.

Felda’s accounts and statements showed that FGV did not make enough to run the settlements and plantations, Wan Shahrir told The Malaysian Insight.

Settlers have complained that Felda is becoming more irregular when it comes to paying them for their harvests. Last year, it was twice a month, this year, it is once a month.

Mansor Osman, a settler from Teranti in Bera, said once, he had to wait more than a month for his harvest payment.

They also complain about being saddled with mysterious debts that keep adding up despite all the deductions Felda make to their incomes.

This simmering discontent was expressed in several meetings with settlers and their children in Bera, and the party that wins the seat will be one that has the most convincing plan to solve their problems

BN’s fixed deposit

Bera has 14 Felda settlements spread over an area about one-and-a-half times the size of Kuala Lumpur.

The settlements have between 350 and 480 settler families each, and they make up a sizeable portion of the voters in the Guai, Kemanyan and Teriang state seats.

In the 13th general election (GE13), each settlement contributed an average of 1,500 votes to the Bera parliamentary constituency, said former PKR candidate Zakaria Abdul Hamid.

In other words, about 21,000 of Bera’s 50,997 votes come from Bera’s Felda settlements, according to GE13 data.

The opposition got only between 20% and 30% of Felda settlers nationwide to vote for it in GE13, Zakaria said.

“Even most of the people in my settlement did not vote for me in 2013,” laughed Zakaria, the son of a settler from Felda Bukit Mendi in Teriang.

Zakaria narrowly lost in Bera by a majority 2,143 against Barisan Nasional’s Ismail Sabri Yaakob.

Most of Zakaria’s support came from the ethnic Chinese community, who made up 32% of voters but who gave 83% of their votes to the Opposition.

Whereas, for BN, it was the opposite. Ismail got seven out of every 10 votes from Felda settlers, and a similar proportion from Bera’s rural Malays.

“Pakatan Rakyat (the former opposition coalition) would have been able to win if I could have gotten an extra 4% of Malay support back then,” said Zakaria.

Fear and debt

Zakaria believes that such a swing among Felda settlers against BN is possible in GE14 due to their numerous problems with the agency.

Another reason is that a much larger portion of the Felda vote is coming from the children of Felda’s first settlers – the second generation.

It is estimated that the second generation, aged between 30 and 50 make up 60% of Bera’s Felda vote, while their parents comprise 20% of the vote. The third generation make up the remaining 20%.

Based on the 2013 results, PKR activists believe it could win Bera if it manages to get an extra 5% swing in Felda settlers.

Second generation settlers such as Ramli Ahmad claim that his peers are more vocal and critical about Felda’s problems compared with their parents.

This was because it’s the second generation of settler, like him, that had to deal with the debts that their parents accumulated, said Ramli of Felda Sebertak.

“I am about RM4,000 in debt. The amount does not seem to go down even though Felda deducts payments from me at every harvest,” said the 55 year-old.

Settlers from Sebertak, Teranti and Mayam expressed variations of the same frustrations to The Malaysian Insight.

“Felda tells me I owe them about RM80,000 but when I ask for a statement with payment details, they won’t give me,” said Mansor Osman.

Another common complaint was how Felda was cutting back on aid that had in the past had been readily available.

Rohana’s incomplete house in Felda Mayam is just one example. Sebertak settler Abu Bakar Din claimed that aid given for funerals (khairat kematian) was also being cut.

The original amount of aid was RM10,000 per family for the death of their parents, said Abu Bakar.

“There are cases where Felda children spend RM3,000 on the funeral. But when they go to claim the remaining RM7,000, they were told that the amount would be used to pay off their parents’ debt.”

Though Felda anger is palpable, Zakaria and other PKR activists are still unsure whether it can translate into votes.

When Pakatan Harapan chairman Dr Mahathir Mohamad visited Bera in May for a ceramah targeted at settlers, he pulled in a crowd of up to 6,000, which the opposition had never been able to do before.

But the mood among settlers changed after Prime Minister Najib Razak announced the five incentives for settlers in late July.

The incentives include a special RM5,000 payout, writing off some of the debts, a RM40,000 housing loan and a grant to replant unproductive trees.

“A month after Najib’s visit, we tried to hold a programme with Dr Wan Azizah (PH president Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail) at one of the settlements, but no one wanted to host us.

“We had to go to five houses before we could find a family who would host us. Many were afraid that if they were seen with the opposition, they might not get those incentives.” – September 29, 2017.