A man in Malaysia found a rather unusual way to draw the authorities’ attention to the condition of a road: he planted a banana tree in a huge pothole.
The man was Mahathir Aripin, a resident of Sabah, Malaysia, who on January 29, 2024, posted a photo of the tree in the middle of Jalan Sandakan-Lahad Datu. To keep it standing, he even placed soil around the trunk, leaving the tree right in the middle of the huge hole.
The protest worked. Just a few hours after the image began circulating, workers from the Sabah Public Works Department arrived at the site and repaired the pothole.
The authorities explained that continuous rainfall had made the work difficult. So what began as a rather unusual way to complain about a road ended with a much more conventional solution: removing the tree and fixing the road.