“Strong, emotive words, no doubt intended to rouse public opinion.” That was how Singapore’s foreign minister, Vivian Balakrishnan, described what Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad had said about the 1962 Water Agreement, in Parliament on March 1, 2019.
Mahathir had spoken the day before, at the Johor government’s retreat with the federal Cabinet in Putrajaya. He called on Johor to speak up against the agreement and asked how a rich nation like Singapore could pay “such an unreasonable rate” for raw water from a poorer country. It was “morally wrong”, he said. Sembawang MP Vikram Nair raised the remarks during the debate on the Foreign Affairs Ministry’s budget.
Balakrishnan called Mahathir’s argument a red herring. The agreement, he said, was not about who is richer. It was about respecting agreements. Singapore and Malaysia guaranteed the water pact in the 1965 Separation Agreement, so a breach would call into question the basis for Singapore’s existence as an independent state. “Neither Malaysia nor Singapore can unilaterally change the terms of this agreement,” he said.
The price review
Singapore’s long-held position was that Malaysia had lost its right to review the price of water. Balakrishnan said Malaysia chose not to seek a review in 1987 because it benefited from the arrangement. Mahathir, prime minister from 1981 to 2003, explained in 2002 that Malaysia did not ask because any revision would also change the price of treated water Singapore sells to Malaysia.
What Singapore says it gives Johor
Balakrishnan listed what he called goodwill supplies. Under the agreement Singapore must provide five million gallons a day of treated water. It was selling 16 million gallons a day, he said, at a fraction of its own cost of treatment. Between January 2 and 4, 2019, it supplied a further 6 million gallons a day after pollution disrupted Johor’s water plants.
He also pointed to the Linggiu Dam, which the national water agency PUB and Johor agreed in 1990 to build, to raise the yield of the Johor River. Johor owns it, but Singapore paid more than $300 million for construction, operating costs, land compensation, lost logging revenue and a one-time lease payment. Singapore has spent more than $1 billion on water projects in Johor overall, he said. In October 2016 a drought dropped the Linggiu Reservoir to a historic low of 20 per cent.
Talks between attorneys-general
In November 2018, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong proposed that the two countries’ attorneys-general meet to compare positions on whether Malaysia still had the right to review the price. They met in December 2018. Balakrishnan said the talks were overshadowed by disputes over the Johor Baru Port Limits and the Seletar Instrument Landing System procedures, and that the two would continue “in due time.”
“We are permanent neighbours and we want to be good neighbours and we have never shied away from dealing with difficult bilateral issues,” he told the House.
