By: SELVARAJA SOMIAH
SABAH opposition is, for all
practical purposes, a collection of four main parties, DAP, PKR, Sabah Star and
SAPP including newly formed but not registered Angkatan Perubahan Sabah (APS)
headed by Wilfred Bumburing and Pakatan Perubahan Sabah (PPS) headed by Lajim
Okin. USNO Baru is also in the fray mobilising support using founder Tun
Mustapha’s name, but, its yet to be registered and very unlikely that it ever
will.
There is a remark
attributed, perhaps apocryphally, to Dr Jeffrey Kitingan to the effect that
most Sabah politics is mathematics, a number game. As political analysis goes,
this remark proves insightful. Sabah politics is, in this view, not driven by
ideology or charisma.
It is constituted by the mundane
activity of stitching together narrow interest-driven coalitions. And electoral
fortunes, for the most part, do not turn on massive changes induced by immense
persuasiveness of candidates. They turn on small swings, and contingent
management of interests.
But if this political
analysis is taken too literally, it can become spectacularly self-defeating. It
can make politics a passive waiting game. As opposition parties in Sabah
prepare to met and strategise, or assuming they ever will, a plan to commit
to one-to-one fights against the Barisan
National in the coming 13th General Elections brews.
Pakatan Rakyat in Sabah
headed by Anwar Ibrahim has little presence here but it has done well in other
PKR states from 2008. Since the last election, it has not expanded its presence
in Sabah although the DAP has its footing in the urban areas.
Lest we forget, elections
are ultimately about the ability to project credibility.
On the economy, the Pakatan
Rakyat states have done well so far. It has given an alternative to
old-fashioned UMNO/BN politics,concocting better versions to solutions. In
Parliament sessions it had the rulling coalition on the mat for the many
economic mess-ups in the last four years.
The most polished
personalities in the Sabah opposition scene, Dr Jeffrey Kitingan and Yong Teck
Lee, don’t seem to show that they have what it takes to run the state economy
like the way Musa Aman has, but has only seem to be harping on the Sabah Rights
vis a vis the Malaysia Agreement 1963.
They are also simply waiting
for the Barisan National Sabah to make more errors to give them a lift. To make
matters worse, internally, the Sabah opposition itself is faced with a series
of simultaneous equations it cannot solve. The main one is of course the
mistrust between Malaya based Pakatan Rakyat and Borneo based Star Sabah and
SAPP.
Most commentators assume
that the Sabah opposition’s central dilemma is between Sabah Rights and a more
centrist position. But, arguably, this is not its biggest dilemma. It will never
be able to persuade die-hard antagonists who think that Sabah joining the
Federation in 1963 to form Malaysia is a mistake.
Regrettable as it might be,
it can probably get away with a game of calculated ambiguity, so long as it is
not deeply polarising. Its central dilemma is that Malaya does not understand
what federalism means for Sabah politics.
If politics has become
genuinely federal, then there are implications for how political parties are
organised. In an ideal situation, like what we see now in the Musa Aman
Government, state-level leaders and units have to believe that there is a
symbiotic relationship between them and the leadership in Putrajaya.
Association with the
Putrajaya leadership enhances the prospects of local units and that’s why we
see so much positivity coming from the Musa Aman government today. But if the
Putrajaya leadership does not significantly add to the state units’ prospects,
or worse still, becomes a liability ( like during the PBS days) then the
central high command has little authority over the state.
On the other hand, a party
composed entirely of state units can have no coherence at the centre, and
cannot project itself as a national party, like in Sarawak. This is the basic
structural dilemma faced by the Sabah opposition.
It is, for all practical
purposes, a collection of four parties; DAP and PKR, (Malaya based), Sabah Star
and SAPP (Borneo based). Except for Jeffrey Kitingan and Yong Teck Lee who can
be considered local leaders, PKR and DAP does not have anyone except Anwar
Ibrahim who isn’t local himself.
So the question of who is
going to lead the Sabah opposition becomes an issue. To complicate matters, PKR
in Sabah is undergoing a leadership crisis. Anwar and his cronies have meddled
and presented Azmin Ali, also an outsider, as a solution to a headless PKR in
Sabah.
Clearly, the Sabah
opposition’s problem is that it has no charismatic local leader of any kind to
take reign, althogether failing to see that the the average age of its cadres
does not reflect new Sabah.
Since Yong Teck Lee’s myopic
misjudgment in Bati Sapi Parliamentary by-elections, the Sabah Opposition has
been groping in dark for a leader. There is a great clamour for Lajim Okin now
however, even if we grant him administrative acumen (not slot-machine acumen!),
his ability to give the Sabah opposition a direction is limited.
Despite Lajim giving up his
RM30,000 salary as a Federal Deputy Minister and resigning as Umno Supreme
Council member, Beaufort Umno Division chief and Beaufort BN chairman,
justifying his actions by way of an epiphany (Lajim claims, after 18 years, to
have come to a realisation that Umno/BN had not done anything for the welfare
of Sabahans) still makes him a polarising figure.
Lajim has got too much
political baggage. He will have to come up with some spectacularly convincing
gesture of contrition to be acceptable to Pakatan Rakyat and Pakatan Rakyat’s
potential allies in Sabah. There is also a curious and potentially fatal
omission in his strategy to make himself acceptable.
Sabahans still see him
as an UMNO member and Lajim has not made
any special initiative to campaign in Sabah. If he is a potential chief
minister, his energies would have been directed to mass engagement across the state.
He remains a question mark in everyone mind.
The only long-term solution
for the Sabah opposition front is to have a serious institutional reform on how
they are run. But no incumbent leader wants this and there is the paradox that
a leader must first acquire authority to do this within current institutional
rules. It is said, with some justification, that any party that wins in Sabah
will look a bit like the Barisan National. But the real issue is, which Barisan
National: the idea or its debased version?
At the moment, the Sabah
opposition is looking more like the debased version: it matches the Barisan
National’s petty-mindedness with its own display of small egos. We can debate
structural issues to death. The Sabah opposition will get a lot of advice from
its faithful on what to do.
But the harder issue to come
to terms with is this: there is a kind of inchoate lack of will that
characterises the Sabah opposition parties, it is as if it is not sincere. Much
of its leadership is doing what it does, not because it sees a point to it, but
because it does not have anything else to do. This is an ultimate kind of
nihilism, politics as casual play, increasingly disconnected with everything
around it especially the economy.
They are unable to show that
if they capture the state they could run it prudently and efficiently like how
Musa Aman has, a cash reserve of RM3.3 Billion, and a state budget getting
bigger and bigger to a tune of RM4 billion a new record, which was never heard
of before Musa Aman.
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