by Dr Rahim Said
Another body pulled from Sungai Klang. An infant this time. Last month it was a man. Before that, a woman no one claimed. Alongside them — fridges, sofas, tyres, and 94,000 metric tonnes of rubbish since 2022.
If rivers could talk, the Klang River would be screaming.
We like to pretend it’s someone else’s fault. The factory downriver. The illegal dumper. The faceless ‘foreigner’. But let’s be honest — many of us living along its banks treat this river like a personal trash chute, a convenient place to toss not just our waste, but our sins.
Old mattresses. Broken TVs. Abandoned pets. Unwanted babies. Out of sight, out of mind, down the river it goes.
The Selangor Maritime Gateway project is now forced to fish out a body almost every month while we lecture about civic-mindedness from our air-conditioned homes.
How did we come to normalise this?
The river has become a graveyard not just for our refuse, but for our conscience.
RM700 million is being spent to clean, widen, and deepen Sungai Klang. But no amount of money can dredge up the rot in our attitudes.
The managing director of Landasan Lumayan Sdn Bhd, Syaiful Azmen Nordin, was spot on when he said, “This project only treats the symptoms, not the cause.”
The cause is us.
It’s easy to blame the authorities when floods come or when a body surfaces. But while government machines pull out refrigerators and corpses, residents upstream toss another bag of kitchen waste into the murky water.
We curse the flood but forget we fed it.
It’s time to stop this shameful practice. Stop treating Sungai Klang like a dump. It’s not a place to rid yourself of mistakes, secrets, or household clutter.
It’s a river, one that could be a lifeline but has been reduced to a sewer by our own hands.
Enough excuses. Enough finger-pointing. The next time you see someone dumping rubbish into a drain or river, call them out.
If you’ve done it, stop. If your neighbour does it, report them. Because the river remembers. One day it might bring those sins back to your doorstep.
(The views of the writer are entirely his)