Uggah (right) with Blandoi when visiting the Saribas Estate on Saturday.
KUCHING: Former Sarawak Land Consolidation And Rehabilitation Authority (Salcra) deputy general manager Joseph Blandoi, 53, has been appointed as its acting general manager effective January 1, this year.
He replaced the former general manager Datu Vasco Sabat Singkang who had retired in December, last year.
Deputy Chief Minister Datuk Amar Douglas Uggah, who is also Salcra’s chairman, made the announcement at a meeting with a few of Salcra Saribas estate landowners’ representatives at Salcra’s office at Simpang Layar in Betong yesterday.
Blandoi, a Bisaya from Limbang who speaks very fluent Iban was among its senior officers present.
Uggah said he was confident with Blandoi at the helm, would bring in a new spirit of development.
“We had sent him for a two-month modern management course at Harvard in the USA last year, which is one of the leading universities in the world.
“We want Salcra to be on a right footing first before allowing it to go further afield in developing more Native Customary Right (NCR) land.
“We still have humongous potentials where we have 300,000 hectares in the Sadok Agropolitan Areas, between 300,000 to 400,000 hectares in the Upper Rejang Development Agency (URDA) and in the High Land Development Agency (HDA) areas and more than 100,000 hectares in our coastal areas,” said Uggah.
In its oil palm areas, Uggah said Salcra is going into livestock breeding where it currently had more than 2,800 heads of cows.
“It is our hope that by next year the cows could give birth to 1,000 calves and for the numbers to be gradually increasing year by year.
“We can then strengthen our livestock breeding programme, for our beef self sufficiency and for export,” said Uggah.
Earlier, Blandoi said he has two initial critical focus for Salcra, to maximise the returns from all estates and to increase manpower competency at every level.
“We also have five strategic thrusts as the way forward for Salcra.
He said the first one was to boost operation excellence with greater adoption of smart technologies.
“We hope to identify technologies which are affordable, implementable and critical in the next three months.
“The we want all our field staffs to record the profit and loss incurred in their daily activities so that by the end of each month, we will be in the know if we are going to make profit or otherwise,”
Blandoi said that this will also unleash staff talents.
“Some of them were recruited on the basis of their good local knowledge and experiences which were eventually forgotten along the way.
“We cannot use the same solutions to problems in every estates. We need local knowledge in our attempt to boost productivity.
“So let us use each other inputs (including from the landowners) then we can have a lot of communications and innovations,” he said.
On the same note, he said the managers would be allowed to make their own decisions instead of having to refer to the headquarters.
“We are going to establish a system for finances, and approval limit of authorities,” he said.
“Auditors would be sent to do very regular spot checks to prevent possible abuses.”
Blandoi added a new policy will be introduced to give priority to local contractors (Class E and below) so that they have more opportunities to carry out contract works through the open tender system.
There is no need to get outside contractors except for those higher level works, he said.
On another note, Blandoi said he was all for the policy that if any estate was not making any profit for a particular year, then all its management and field workers should not receive any bonus for the year.
“It does not look right to me for them to enjoy the bonus when the participating landowners are not getting any dividend.
“These are all in my plans,” he said.
A political secretary to the chief minister Dr Richard Rapu and Betong District Officer Sofhi Jebal were present at the meeting.