IT was Merdeka eve and business as usual for Mohd Arif Izwani, who sells Kelantanese sambal fried chicken with nasi kukus.

He was, however, late getting to his stall from the workshop where he had gone to pick up his 12-year-old Proton Waja.

“There goes RM100,” Arif said in Kelantanese as he rushed to fry chicken and mix the iced cordial drinks.

Life wasn’t always like this, said the 31-year-old, at his stall outside SMK Tiara Permai in Taman Wahyu, Kuala Lumpur.

Before he came to Kuala Lumpur, Arif sold Astro subscriptions in Pasir Puteh, Kelantan, earning RM3,000 a month. But after he was retrenched in 2014, Arif decided to move to the capital with his wife and two children.

“I was making good money in Kelantan. But after I was retrenched, it was hard to find another job as work was scarce in Kelantan,” Arif told The Malaysian Insight.

But although there are more jobs in the city, there were few options for Arif who only has SPM qualification. 

In the first three years in the city, Arif and his wife tried selling clothes and perfumes on Facebook. But they made no more than a few hundred ringgit a month.

In the meantime, the family had grown from four to six with the arrival of two more children.

When their savings were used up on rent and food, the family moved in with his in-laws’ who lived in a PPR flat in Taman Wahyu in Kg Batu. 

It is a tight squeeze for the six of them and the seven people already living there.

The rent is RM125 a month for the two-bedroom council flat they share.

Arif is now hoping to rent another unit and has been on the waiting list since January.

When the Facebook business failed, Arif turned to the Federal Territory Islamic Religious Council for help. He received RM1,500 which he invested in a stall in front of the school.

He bought a collapsible table, a small tent, cooking utensils and ingredients for his nasi kukus ayam, which sells at RM5.50 a packet.

But the stall is illegal.

“I tried to get a hawker licence from DBKL but they don’t give out licences for roadside stalls.”

On a good month, Ariff earns between RM900 and RM1,200. But there’s nothing left at the end of the month.

“We can only afford to go back to the kampung once a year, during Raya. And that is after much scrimping and scraping.”

The long Merdeka weekend is no holiday for Arif and his family.

“A treat for us is to go into town to see the lights. We can’t afford anything else. On most other days, we just stay home in Batu.”

Many Arifs

Batu constituency sub-zone chairman Vincent Yap said there were many cases like Arif in the area.

“Many come from other states and struggle to make ends meet. 

“While it’s difficult  to help cases that involve elderly people as they can neither work nor do they have anyone they can depend on, we try to help family men like Arif start a business or find a DBKL flat to rent,” said the local councillor.

Welfare group Women of Will is running a baking programme for the poor in Batu this year.

Batu, said Yap, has six sub-zones and each is home to three to six PPR housing schemes, each home to almost 10,000 people.

The former property management consultant said overdevelopment in Sentul has forced the poorer ones into public housing.

The bulk of the households, said Yap, are in the B40 group.

“And while there are some who earn around RM2,000 a month, others earned below RM1,000.”

The country’s poverty rate came under the spotlight again when a United Nations representative said Malaysia has undercounted its poor.

UN special rapporteur Prof Philip Alston said a realistic poverty rate would be 16%-18% instead of the stated 0.4%.

Economist Prof Martin Ravallion, who is based in Universiti Malaya, appeared to corroborate the statement. He said the poverty line income (PLI) of RM980 per month was not in keeping with the country’s status as an upper middle-income nation.

A paper Ravallion wrote in January states that the current PLI of RM8, or US$2, per day was relevant in the 1970s.

“If one looks instead at countries with a roughly similar average income as Malaysia, one would expect the poverty line to be about US$12 a day – three times the current line in Malaysia.

“That would indicate a national poverty rate of about 20%, not 0.4%.”

Not too heavy

Paralympics double bronze medallist in weightlifting, Mariappan Perumal counts himself lucky to be receiving a sports pension from the government.

“If not for the pension, we would have to rely on social welfare,” said Mariappan, who has a walking disability after contracting polio at the age of three.

“Each time I go off to represent the country, I would lose my job.” 

Mariappan won his bronze medals in Seoul 1988 and Barcelona 1992.

“The companies that I worked for said that I left my job too long every time I represented the country overseas.”

Mariappan, who has won 80 medals in his career, receives RM400 a month from social welfare. His wife, B. Chandriga, who also had polio, receives the same amount.

The couple live in a two-bedroom flat in Batu. 

With the money he saved from his weightlifting days and the aid from social welfare, Mariappan and Chandriga have raised two daughters and a son.

“My eldest daughter is working and studying accountancy part-time and my son is learning electrical wiring. The youngest is in form two.”

The 61-year-old feels he has been fortunate.

“It’s hard but manageable. We had hoped that the sports ministry could help us with landed public housing because we are both wheelchair-bound. But second floor isn’t too bad.”

Just a little help

For Arif, all will be well if his application for a PPR flat is approved.

“We won’t have to squeeze into one flat then and who knows, I could start my own shop over there one day,” pointing to the row of show houses across the street from his stall.

“All I need is a bit of mercy from the authorities (that they would not raid his stall) and a small push (a flat) and I would be on my way.

“But all we can do now is hope and watch the lights from afar,” said Arif, as he hurried off for noon prayers.

While he’s away, his nine-year-old son will man the stall. – September 1, 2019.